[Status: Not Planned] Changing the "Author" of a project

Can't believe this post is going to celebrate 5 years in 4 months and it's still being on backlog. I completely agree with Paola Martin. I think it's time you should consider priorizing minor/easy/less impact changes with more frequency than long and complicated ones.

Following Wrike's Best Practices, we try to keep ONE assignee to a task. We often have a traffic manager enter in tasks for an account exec. The traffic manager is now the AUTHOR of the task. We also have online forms that, when submitted, have WRIKE BOT as the author. Other than the workaround of duplicating a task, creating a custom field or using approvals, all of which just add more unwanted steps, we have no way to filter the tasks through a dashboard. Simply changing the author would allow for filtering without any additional (and unwanted) steps. It is incredibly difficult to teach our entire team the constant workarounds for these type of things when a simple "change author" would suffice.

Thanks for your reply @... 

I might agree with you, but what is the point of the automation rule offering @authors as a recipient of certain notifications when that person/role is no longer in the organization and the owner is someone else? I know I can use a @username to name the new owner, but if the rule runs on a workspace that has 20 projects, I would have to make 20 rules instead of 1, which is not very efficient in terms of administration.

I hope you understand the need to be able to change the author of a project from this point of view.

Bye!

No that will not work. If a TASK for our Graphics team is entered by a traffic manger or a WRIKE BOT (via external form), it is then passed on to the Account Exec to manage, the assignee would be the graphic artist and not the Account Exec/manager. The only way to filter for the Account Exec's dashboard is to make them an Approver or add a custom field with their name. The Account Exec is not an assignee, so we cannot filter for that, unless we had two assignees on the task - the Graphic Artist and the Account Exec. (Like I said, we are trying to stick with Wrike's recommendations of only having one assignee per task.) PROJECTS have OWNERS that can oversee that project. Single tasks do not have OWNERS, only AUTHORS. That is why we want the ability to change the AUTHOR. I know that is a lot, but we have been going in circles with workarounds for years now, involving custom fields and approvers; the workarounds are tedious and get missed by my team most of the time. In lieu of having OWNERS on individual TASKS, a simple transfer of AUTHOR would solve this. If I am missing something, please let me know.

Hi Juan.

I would do if I had that option, but like Tom OOO 2025-2050 explained above tasks don't have owners (and my rules are based on tasks, not on projects). 

Thank you for this additional feedback, folks! I'm passing it on to our Product team 👍

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 all, writing to see if there is an update for this? Mainly since I've changed roles at my workplace and now am working on different projects. While I've reassigned all my tasks to the colleagues taking over them, because I'm still the 'Author' I keep getting update emails about these tasks. It's a bit annoying and frustrating, and I wanted to chime in that I too think this would be a great feature to employ. 

We don't have an update to share on this topic at the moment Emily Koller-Apelskog.

I'll send your feedback to the team. Thank you for sharing your use case! 

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 all,

+1 for this functionality which would be useful than having to create additional fields making management more complex

Lisa Here's my PM team's use case for wanting the "Change Author" functionality.

We auto-generate Blueprint projects from project Request Forms. This saves a lot of manual setup time. The challenge we're facing is the Client Partnership person that submits the Request Form becomes the Author of the project & all its tasks. We'd love to transfer Ownership/Authorship to the Project Manager. At present, the Client Partnership person is getting all the notifications/inbox messages because they're the Author, not the Project Manager.

We appreciate your feedback, folks! Thank you for sharing, and rest assured it will be passed on to the team 🙌 

And please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with! 

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 hear you Matt Karaffa . I'm a kind of administrator for the company I work for and I upload most projects from xls files. After that, I transfer projects to product managers (that is the end owner of that), but I keep getting notifications over and over :(

Hi Ricardo Rudolph, thank you for the additional details. I can see in the screenshot you shared that you have the option "author" ticked. Would it help to untick this option and choose "assignees" instead?

As you pointed out, tasks don't have owners, but they do have assignees. In case I'm not understanding your case correctly, please feel free to share any additional details so we can provide you with an accurate reply 🙂

Thank you!

Hi Juan, thanks for the reply. 

What you suggest won't solve my need. Let's try to make the following use case : 

- Juan is the Brand Manager and will be the project manager for a new Marketing Campaign that will be tracked in Wrike.

- Lisa is the person in charge to accomplish some tasks

- Ricardo is the IT specialist who helped to setup the project in Wrike

Sample Use Case : Juan needs to use Wrike to manage a new campaign and asks Ricardo to set it up. Ricardo creates a new workspace, inivtes users to it, create some roles, a workflow and a XLSX file with over 400 tasks, project dates, some automations and roles assigned to each task. Once he has succesfully imported it into Wrike, he will change the project assignee to Juan, as he will be the person in charge to develop and control it; at this point Juan will be the project assignee and Ricardo will still be the author and follower of 400 tasks that aren't under his responsability, and Juan will have to manually follow each task if interested in them. Now, 2 weeks have passed and suppose Juan hasn't followed any task yet and Lisa's first tasks are overdue; one of the automations, will trigger a notification to "author" and/or "assignees" : Juan won't receive any as he's not the author and has no tasks assigned, but Lisa and Ricardo will receive them.

Main Problem : Juan won't have that critical info on time.

Solution Proposed/Expected :if author of the project can be changed someway by an specific profile/user, Juan inmediatly will be the new author and will also be assigned to all project tasks, so the automation rule will work as expected (notifying the right author and assignees).

Let me know if it's more clear now.

Thanks !

Hi Ricardo Rudolph, thank you very much for your detailed reply. I've shared your case with our dedicated team and please rest assured that we will keep you informed in case there are any changes applied 👍

This should be an easy fix. If updating the author field is not an option, then create a new level of ownership, which can be updated as needed, and then allow us to create rules and reports based on this new level of ownership. 

I am also needing this feature.  Other managers are creating tasks for other people OOO but get all the updates.  I am an admin and am creating many tasks for others and I get so many notifications for things that are not mine I no longer track them.  As a results, I am missing notifications I really do want to see.

Hi Erick Pinzon, welcome to the Community. Thank you for sharing your feedback, I understand this would be an important addition for you and your team and please rest assured that we will keep you updated in this thread. 

Loren Markle thank you for sharing your use case with us!

Hi community team 

This would be a welcome addition - I have moved teams but am the Author of previous recurring tasks for my old team and should not be able to see the wrike that they are working on since my move.

I have removed myself as an assignee and from the group Workspace but still get all the notifications for the Task.  This is not a great user experience from a confidentiality POV.

With 81 Upvotes is there any update on progress of this request?

Thanks

Shellie

Hi,

I want this feature available, too. We've experienced authors leaving the organization, and we want to transfer the projects and tasks from the former author to the new person. To respect legal and ethical, I am wondering about an author transfer function that provides a history of the predecessors.

Thanks,

Yahya

Hi Shellie Duggan Yahya Sampurna, thank you for your comments, I'm afraid that at the moment we don't have updates regarding this suggestion. I've shared your feedback with our relevant team and we will keep you informed if anything changes 👍

Please, let us know if there's anything else we can help you with.

I left a department in the same university and because I built the request form and blueprints, I continue to be the author many projects from my old department, now with the Wrike Bot I am tagged when no action is taken on task after certain number of days. Would be helpful if you could have a department, group of admins, or a space be the author rather than a singular person that might leave, move departments, cover for others, and many of the other issues mentioned above. 

I need a way to manually override "author" (and "task creator" if it's the same thing.)

I rely on the "Add task creator as approver" option in our automated Wrike approval workflows, but I often create tasks for less tech-savvy stakeholders.

This makes things messy and delays projects because I end up getting added as an approver on projects during stakeholder review.

Hi there, are we able to get this implemented now that we’ve reached over 100 upvotes? This is really important for our team as we work on rolling out Wrike across the company. Thanks so much!

Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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I'm also running into issues with this. The challenge I have is moreso related to blueprints. When we migrated to Wrike, I helped our teams and created all of their blueprints and then gave them ownership of them. My issue now, several years later is that anytime they update a blueprint it sends me an email notification. 👎 I'm currently 50 emails in and it doesn't seem like there is an end in sight. 

Hi Jared Barden, thank you for bringing this to our attention. Just to confirm, have you unfollowed these blueprints? If you are still following these blueprints, you will receive notifications for updates. If the issue persists, please let me know so I can ask a member of our support team to assist you further.

Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Rohan V Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Rohan V -- Correct. I unfollowed the blueprints at creation and verified again this morning that I am not following them.