[Status: Launched! 🚀] Ability to Assign Tasks to "Generic" or General Assignees

I echo the other comments.  the participation of third parties in a plan does impact the timing of the project and the formulation of actions.  I think it would also be useful to have a dummy team member who could be assigned a task w/o being added as a collaborator

up! ... we'd also require this function of assigning "virtual co-workers" or collaborators outside of our organization - without actually inviting them to join wrike, but just to have them and their tasks visible in our project overview.

Our use case would be for projecting resources for un-signed but scoped projects. This will allow us to understand the total need for resources for booked and projected work. 

For us, this is a must-have feature! 

In addition I think its useful to be able to assign a task to a non email address resource because in our case we have some task that are in the plan that we are currently recruiting for and want to ensure the plan is levelled in the future against planned resource.

That would definitively be a good option to have!

We need this ASAP

We need this ASAP

@cristian @michael I'm looking for something more like what you describe, a role that can be assigned as a placeholder until a specific resource can be assigned. You may be interested in this product feedback idea: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115003096809-Allow-Services-or-Departments-to-be-assigned-in-templates. 

This is an extremely important feature - as I need to know that the responsibility of that task is with another group / team or outside vender with having them sign up to wrike. 

Surprising to see this isn't fixed yet. It's such a simple and rudimentary feature in project planning for extra-company projects.

Another idea which I thought could solve the problem was using Resourcegroups, and then just add a "dummy" resourcegroup with the customers name. One would then assign the task to this new Resourcegroup and it would look like it was assigned to any other normal user.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to assign to a resourcegroup. You only get a list of the people inside a specific resourcegroup when you search in the Add Assignee field.

An added benefit of this, is also the fact sometimes you're not reliant on a single person to complete a task, but rather a team.

@Wrike: Please consider fixing this

I agree with @Christian Zollner, tossing tasks over the wall to "Resource Group" is a common use case for us. We could keep track via a large number of custom workflow statuses (e.g. Waiting on ____ Department), but that is a never ending spiral of statuses that someone has to maintain. Plus nothing shows up in workload view, or the default person (e.g. PM) constantly looks very overloaded on Workload view. 

I also agree with the need for non-email dummy users that can be assigned for either A) outside resources who cannot/will not use Wrike and B) templates and advanced planning. How am I supposed to use Wrike's great workload features to schedule project load and balance across a department, when I don't know who exactly will be doing it? I don't want to have to blow up multiple user's inboxes with notifications as I play around with assignees to get the schedule properly load balanced for 2 months out.

In our case, we are entertaining the idea of only having PMs create, view, and edit tasks in Wrike. The main reason here is that having too many hands in the pot can create inconsistency in how Wrike is being used. The PM gets tasks updates from the team and then updates the tasks, accordingly.

But at the same time, we need them to be separate "users" so we can see their utilization and availability in the calendar views in Wrike.

Hi everyone, thanks a lot for your input here! The post has reached 60 votes and we applied the Investigating status to this feature suggestion. Our Product team is looking at ways to implement this at the moment, but I can't promise anything yet. I'll update the thread when I have new info.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

I'm building new project plans now that involve many outside vendors. Same scenario as original post, we need to track a person or company that owns the task but do not need them to collaborate or have a user account. I'm doing this in Google Sheets. Wrike's revenue needs, e.g. no month to month plans, no dummy accounts, may be the plan that Wrike management has decided. Each issue I've had with Wrike clearly goes back to revenue generation. Obviously I want Wrike to make a buck but it's fast becoming overpriced based on the functionality Wrike is restricting.

I've been on and recommended Wrike the last few years. I have friends who have moved there companies to Wrike. Going forward I'll need to add the caveat... as long as it's for internal use only and you will never need to track anything outside your company. It's too bad... was loving Wrike.

Thanks for the update @Lisa.

I'm on @Dave Benton's bandwagon...

I was just explaining to our sales rep last week that we are holding off on the next licensing-jump (10 seats at a time!!**) or early renewal of our annual contract because of the effects of this issue.

We really want to use Wrike's powerful ability as a workflow engine to automate processes and workflows throughout our organization.

What's stopping us? The painful workarounds to "assignees" having to be individuals (not groups) and associated to email accounts (even when a 'dummy' account would do) are holding us back. For example, when we build a workflow/project template, we know "Accounting" has to handle a task, but we don't know who (which User) in Accounting will do it... especially 6 months from now when a task is created. Some person with authority in Accounting should see this work task then, and choose that assignee, not today. That 'person' may not even work here today... assignments should be based on Roles, not individuals. Reference any customer service system using agents, like ZenDesk or Freshdesk.

Wrike seems to be hiding their head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge how people actually get work done. The Request Forms and the automation behind them are potentially brilliant - until Susie in Accounting goes on vacation and the entire workflow breaks because it's based on her presence as the only assignee to a task on the critical path through the process. Sure, Tom could fill in and try to remember to look at the tasks assigned to her, but we're trying to form habits here. Users have habits - ones we hope lead to adopting Wrike as "the place" they go each day to find their work. If tasks aren't assigned to Tom, or his Group/Role, they aren't in his natural work path, and are likely to be forgotten or missed. Workarounds are anathema to habit. Forming Habits is the key to adoption and longevity of a solution.

We want this to work for us, and enrich Wrike - we really do. But we also want to spend our precious resources on partners who acknowledge and understand our needs and are fanatical about serving them. Not coincidentally, being such a partner is the path to riches (high revenues from sticky customers)  - as opposed to serving your revenue model first, and our needs second.

Again, glad to hear about progress - we hope you'll make this change a priority.

** This is another scheme of Wrike's that feels like greed - and one that no other modern SaaS vendors employ. If your needs are for just 1 or 2 seats over the 50 (FIFTY!) you've already purchased, then you MUST buy TEN more to get ONE!! Thankfully it's a soft-cap that doesn't stop an admin from adding those seats and working out the details with Wrike. #Grateful   I've become a Team Coach... pulling players off the Full User court to sit on the Collaborator bench until they get their head in the Wrike game. This sucks for everyone, including Wrike.

Jamie - your post is amazing and is spot-on with why the need for this feature is so important.  Head in the sand is a good analogy for this and for other features that are so common sense it baffles me as to why they are not commonplace in this tool.

I'm not a negative Nancy about Wrike - it's got great potential - I am simply a customer trying to advocate for what could help me and others use the tool better and get the company more business when people can abandon other less useful, but more basic feature-rich tools to go with Wrike.

Jamie, 

Thanks for putting to words what our agency continues to feel. Our initial commitment to Wrike was to help us get an understanding of workload across our entire agency. Wrike is falling down in that category for our agency and the result is the adoption of other systems and processes outside of Wrike. Which is basically putting us back to where we were when we started. We continue to work on "hacks" and "workarounds" as Wrike is the tool that the agency has committed to, for now. 

Yes, Jamie! Automate to user groups, not individuals! This is basic IT/PM best practice. Let the end users decide when to pull tasks off the backlog and who to assign them to. But we need to be able to see "Oh, Brand Managers group is overloaded for the next 3 months." Generic assignees makes this much easier.

To add on, If I am planning 10 projects with an aggregate 500 tasks and 1000 hours of work over the next 3 months for capacity planning, can you imagine the email/notification volume to individual contributors? By the time I load balance 3 times, you're looking at a minimum of 1500 emails/notifications (150 per user if 10 users), possibly more if multiple users are assigned to a task. That is 1500 spam emails from me, using up a bunch of my social capital. The results is that my team will not read the 10 important emails from day-to-day critical task rescheduling. Instead, they route all Wrike emails to Trash and don't pay attention. That is a bad habit which should be avoided at all costs.

I would like to see this feature too.

Echoing everyone's need here. 

Our use case is the same as everyone's here. We need to be able to forecast out by roles in order to utilize the new Workload functionality. We need to be able to add the roles needed to then see if we need to hire additional resources. 

In addition we can group people by roles under groups then report out aggregate workload by discipline. Example, we have copywriters assigned to multiple projects. There is a new project assigned to a dummy copywriter. We can either swap out once we see the capacity of the other copywriters to see who is available. In addition we run a report to see how much work had been done across all copywriters to see if it warrants a new hire. 

So I just spent the last hour reading every comment on this thread, and trying ideas... are we all just screwed here now? I'm trying to decide wether to build out workflows for every single employee, or force them to mass edit a hunt-and-peck list of tasks to assign every time they duplicate. 72 upvotes, and still nothing for 3 years? I'm starting to regret our recommendation. I just realized that making my own dummy accounts requires using up paid-for seats, and making my IT dept make dummy email addresses, all so i can *trick* Wrike to do what we need? Is there no solution for us???

Joey. 

We have given up the fight on this. I have deleted all of the dummy accounts and settled on Smartsheets to do this planning. Once we get out of proposal stage and we have a signed agreement, producers/PMs create the tasks in Wrike or just import a MSProject type file with all of the tasks and the assignments. In some cases we are using Project to plan all of this work, aggregate all of the projects into one master sheet and look at capacity. Our Finance and leadership teams crave this sort of view and as such it is a requirement moving forward in 2019. 

I dont understand Wrike's thinking on many of these basic productivity issues that many of us ask for.

Not sure if there is a short-term financial goal or a misunderstanding of how important these issues are to us.

Am confused.

We really need this function as well.

Hi everyone, thanks for your continued support for this suggestion! The Product team is now investigating job roles, and your input here is very valuable. I'll get back to you as soon as I have an update. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi,

I would like to add some additional feedback and express my support for this request.

Ideally you would be able to initial use these "roles" just as generic placeholders on the templates an easy starting point for your planning. Additionally they would also be available during normal planning activities that are not based on a template. Overall they should show up in the normal Assignee dropdown (perhaps with a different icon to identify them and make it configurable to show them or not for some users).

But then it should be possible that these same roles are also assigned to the users in the system and you would be able to easily be able to replace these role by massedit on a project by an user that has that role and also do the same on individual task level so you can do final planning.

Additionally the workload should allow reports based on the roles only so we could compare booked effort by these roles and available effort.

This role itself doesn't need to be a new concept in Wrike, you could use the existing security role concept and just add a flag to indicate that this is also a role used for resource and workload planning. Of course how it would be used would be completely new. This might need a change to the license model as many more groups might be created.

PS We are currently using the work around of using the "fake" collaborator with the +something in the email address but this has it's limitations.

Thanks, Marc

PS I posted this message in multiple threads as multiple threads talk about similar issues to show my support and need for this kind of feature.

I would also like to add my support for this request.

Our use case:

We create project proposals in wrike. This statement of work is to be confirmed by the client before we turn it into a project. On the tasks in the statement of work, we need to assign roles: e.g. designer, developer, project manager.

When the proposal is turned into a project, we will start assigning team members to the roles. However, it might be that a particular role cannot be assigned to anyone, because all team members with that role are over committed.

So for us ideally, each team member has a role (or multiple). When a role assignment is replaced by a team member, the dropdown shows first those users with that role. Then in the workload tab, the roles should be visible, because I would like to know if I have a lot of work for a designer, which has not been assigned. This gives me the necessary insight if I should recruit another designer into the team, to handle the workload for the coming period.

I wonder if this suggestion would be in the same thread or not:
Selecting a project/folder/task > "Re-Assign all *name* with <list of users to choose from> "  

We've started using Request Forms + Blueprints/templates for a lot of projects, and having a 'variable' like 'designer' would be amazing for us - presently we are using a static dropdown list, to allow the requestor to select a name, and then it adds the assignee, but it can only do this to a task or project, not the subtasks.

We know it is possible on a technical level, due to the way that Wrike handles groups and users. I can assign a group or a user to many things, share, etc. so the workaround some have found, in a totally ridiculous way - is to create dummy accounts. this is honestly a way of tricking Wrike into working how we want it to, so why not just give us an email-less ability to set up dummy accounts? 

With the placeholder/dummy account, you can set up templates/blueprints with them, and then mass-edit, swapping the variable for a real person - but imagine the amazing ability to click into a project or task - and select "re-assign all *name* with> " without having to go into mass-edit and click each checkbox? 

Please add this feature. Our team needs it.