I noticed something interesting this week while creating workflow rules for various CRM entities related to how CRM treats the assignment of the owner of a record internally.

When you Assign a record to another party within CRM, it actually follows an assignment process internally.

When you change the owner of a record, it physically appears to be the same process as Assigning but is it not.  It is merely changing the Owner attribute of the record.

I mention this because if you have workflow rules that are based on the Assign action, and the user merely changes Owner, the Assign workflow rule will not be activated.

Well that's a simple work around: just have the user perform an Assign instead of changing the owner.  Good idea, but you can't Assign a record until that record has been saved. Saving is an extra step and it takes time.  Users generally don't like extra steps or time wasted.  Those are just more things that interfere with their already hectic day.  This means they won't do what you ask and that carefully developed solution you hand-crafted is sitting around unused.

So, when creating automated solutions that utilize workflow, pay special attention to how people are using the system.  Just to make sure that your solution actually increases their productivity and doesn't decrease their productivity.