worklists

A worklist is a collection of tasks or jobs that are awaiting completion, used to organize and coordinate work across individuals or teams. It provides a view of pending work, helps assign responsibility, and tracks progress toward completion.

Typical items on a worklist include an identifier, description, assignee, due date, priority, status, category, and timestamps for creation, updates, and completion. Worklists support filtering, sorting, and bulk operations, and may enforce simple or multi-step workflows with defined state transitions. They can be implemented as standalone lists or as part of broader workflow or case management systems.

Worklists appear in many domains. In IT service management, they queue help desk tickets; in manufacturing they list shop-floor tasks or work orders; in healthcare they track patient care tasks; in software development they function as task boards or backlog views integrated with issue trackers. They can be presented as vertical queues, Kanban boards, or tabular lists, depending on the workflow requirements.

Benefits of worklists include improved visibility of workload, clearer accountability, and the ability to prioritize and balance tasks to meet deadlines. They support easier monitoring of throughput and SLA compliance and provide an audit trail of who did what and when. Limitations can stem from data quality issues, misconfiguration leading to bottlenecks, and the need for governance to prevent duplication or drift between systems.

Design considerations for implementing worklists include the data model and fields, user permissions, SLA rules, notification mechanisms, reporting and analytics, and integration with other systems such as ERP, CRM, or manufacturing execution systems. Common approaches range from simple ordered lists to Kanban-style boards and template-driven task lists.