Feature Request: allow Task Assignment to 'generic / placeholder' names

Hi John, thank you for posting this suggestion, the details are great! There are two similar suggestions on the Community already, and it would be fantastic if you could add your vote and comment to them, so that the popularity of these requests could be tracked in one place:

• Ability to Assign Task to "Generic" or General Assignees
• Assign a Task Based on its Folder/Project (Default Task Owner)

Let me know if you have any questions!

Anastasia, I think that the first is similar to my request, but is actually not quite the same. Megan appears to want to leave the generic assignment in place, as the Task has been outsourced to a Vendor... allowing the vendor to manage and track that piece of work. I think this is a valid use-case, and would be a valuable add.

In my use case, the generic or placeholder really needs to be changed to a real individual... from our own team.... but at the time the project or template is defined, we only know the type of user to be used. Megan's request might be a conditional subset of my request, but that would depend on how it is implemented.

For the second, it appears to be more of an information flow request... someone adds a Task, leaving it unassigned... the Owner of the parent is notified of the add and assignment need. I think this is a valid use-case.

In my use-case, we are not ready to do the assignment, we do not need anyone notified or the pending assignment in their to-do-list... This placeholder assignment is complete, until we are reviewing for actual assignment... in the case of a template, we would never actually assign, only allow the placeholder to be carried into the duplicated project --- so we know who / what kind of folks need assignment.

Thanks, ---john

John, thank you for clarifying, this information is really helpful! I understand wha you're looking for now, and I'll make sure to direct other users supporting this idea to your post.

Anastasia, This task is similar to the suggestion I made, but I do not want to keep the placeholder in place once the project is made active. I would want to auto assign all placeholders for a specific "service" with one individual. We use the "dependencies" features like crazy, so almost every task is linked to at least one other task, and the team stays the same throughout the entire project lifecycle. That means that all tasks with the placeholder "Designer" will need to be auto assigned to one individual who is assigned to that "role" as Designer. This could be 1 task, or it could be 50 tasks, depending on the type of project.

Anastasia, I see this as a subset of Ability to Assign Task to "Generic" or General Assignees.

Yes, there is a different use case (representing a vendor or an inside role), but the implementation could be the same. Make it possible to create unlimited dummy role accounts (and thereby outside party accounts which are only managed internally). I see it as a response to the question "How many project resources will I need for the future, not knowing (or caring) who will be assigned?"

Coupled with the effort allocation that was recently implemented, the ability to provide Generic role assignees (e.g. programmer, Brand manager, Vendor, etc.) could answer the question like this: "Wow, it looks like there are 440 hours assigned to the Brand Management team across 500 tasks for the next 3 months. We only have capacity for 330 hours, and we will greatly exceed daily work rate in 2 months. I should probably hire 3 people or dig down into the details and reassign tasks to other roles". 

As it stands now, I could assign all 440 of those hours to my 11 people, but then I would need to aggregate the hours back up for capacity planning, rebalance 7 or 77 times, send them a bunch of useless wrike task change emails, and then have to repeat the process in 3 months when the projects go live. That is no way to do long range planning. And the excessive noise created by all those emails to individual assignees means they won't pay attention to the real notifications when I need them to respond (e.g. "Why is this specific task late/over budget?"). Make us a way to iterate future cases without bothering people, complete with generic assignees by role to load-balance.

Hi @Jonathan, thanks for your input here! Your feedback is passed to our Product team, and upvotes of the original suggestion help them assess its popularity among Wrike users. For now, I don't have an update to share with you, but I'll get back to you when I have news. Once the suggestion hits 60 votes, we'll add one of the Product Feedback statuses to it.

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.

Just adding my vote for this feature as well. Especially given what I have seen regarding the new Wrike resourcing tool, it will become increasingly important to generate placeholder resources from which you can then resource your actual team.

For the immediate term, I am trying to setup dummy resources, but cannot figure out a way to do this without creating fake email accounts. Does anyone have any suggestions?

This would be very useful for us as well - we'd like to be able to assign tasks to generic 'Client' type users where we are waiting on the client to perform a duty that, once complete, will trigger internal tasks via dependency. To assign it to an internal user in the mean time just clutters up dashboards and reports.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to pop in here again to let you know (in case you didn't see it yet) that Job Roles are now available as a part of the Wrike for Professional Services package and Wrike Resource add-on. They might not cover all the use-cases you've shared here, but I hope they can be helpful in some of the cases. 

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

Just discovered Wrike myself, and am trying it out...and the very first showstopper/can't-use-the-app limitation I found led me to this discussion.

I'm trying to use the Gantt view for planning. I don't have the various people assigned to their tasks yet, and what I really need is to say "this task requires a frontend developer" (something like your Job Roles above). But I couldn't find this anywhere.

Now I've inadvertently downgraded to the "free" plan and Gantt charts have disappeared, so maybe this service simply isn't for me.

Hi Tim Mensch, welcome to the Community! 🤗

Job roles are a part of the Wrike for Professional Services package and Wrike Resource add-on. Please check out the articles and if this is something you're looking for, I can help you to get in touch with Wrike representatives to discuss this. 

Gantt Chart is available on all paid Wrike accounts, so please let me know if you'd like to upgrade back, I'll be happy to help 😊

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