Can we change how custom fields behave for certain item types?
We are experimenting with the ability to apply custom fields to Users and Items. We've successfully built the following model:
Custom field: Supporting Team
- Single-select for Users (represents the team they're on)
- Multi-select for Items (represents the team supporting the project or task, narrows down the user selection list for Assignee)
We'd like to keep Supporting Team multi-select for Projects (since we also have a single-select Driving Team field for the team leading it up) and make it single-select for Tasks for clarity of reporting and assignment. We're also pushing behavioral changes so that tasks get split up if more than one team is needed to complete them, but this UI change would help a lot.
What other approaches can be taken to solve this challenge?
That makes sense, Cynthia Sperry. Would you also like Driving Team to be one of the Supporting Team values selected for a project?
You can also set up User Groups for the Team, makes sharing items easier!
What if you split "Supporting Team" into two fields?
1) “Supporting Team(s)” (multi-select) - applied only to Projects
2) “Assigned Team” (single-select) - applied only to Tasks
This slightly increases field count and complexity, but keeps field behavior consistent and simplifies logic for different item types. You can prevent one field from doing two things while communicating intent more clearly to users. This may also make reporting easier since you're always querying the field the same way per item type.
Second thought, would a custom workflow to signal Team responsibility help? You could customize task workflows to include team-specific statuses, like "In Progress - Marketing" or "Ready - Ops". Gives your team an easy visual cue of who's working on what and can be paired with field data for reporting.
These are great suggestions, thanks!
John - I would love to see Driving Team automatically set as a Supporting Team entry for projects, but I can solve that with an automation at this point.
David - This would be an acceptable solution technically but I wonder about feasibility and adoption. We're still in that "overwhelmed with options" phase of Wrike adoption and I'm working to reduce the number of truly required custom fields in our configuration. I'm not sure my users would all accept a separate field for Assigned Team - and I don't think I can set a Tasks-Only custom field in the settings unless that has changed recently. Likewise, we've got lots of workflows already and haven't had much success in getting our end-users to pay attention to which workflow they've selected. :(
User groups and custom fields usually work well for this.