Counteract Overdue Tasks for Assignees in Templates
In our templates, there are certain users that will always be assigned to specific tasks such as our copywriter, editor, and production manager. Because of this, we assigned them to their respective tasks in the templates we created. That has been a really helpful tool so that we don't have to manually assign them to their tasks at project inception, but because the templates are linked to dates, the system shows that they have overdue tasks from the templates, which in turn makes the "My Work" view useless. Additionally, these overdue tasks are logged in our task reporting, even though they aren't actually overdue, they are just associated with a template. We have tried to socialize using the "Dashboard" view instead of the "My Work" view to help manage the "My Work" issue, but the reporting issue is one we have yet to solve. Any suggestions?
I'm new to Wrike, so maybe you have tried this already. We have set our templates as "backlogged" and then the individual tasks, when appropriate, are set up as dependencies. That way, once the template is duplicated and turned into an active project, the deadline is assigned and the other tasks get due dates based on the dependencies. For example, I work on a monthly newsletter. I work with a graphic designer for the graphics and layout, another person reviews the draft, and then I make any updates. I've set up the tasks as dependencies working backwards from my deadline - one day for final updates, two days to review, a day for layout, two days for graphics, three days for gathering content. Once I set the deadline for the newsletter, my gathering content task is set up to start 10 business days from when it's due.
Hi Cassie, thanks for your response! We have all of our templates set up like this as well, but our issue is not with having our tasks set for incorrect dates, it's that we don't have the ability to disassociate the assignee from the tasks in the templates without having overdue tasks because of the dependencies we have set up. Sorry if I didn't communicate this well in my initial post, but I do appreciate your input!
Hi Sage, thanks for your post, it's an interesting one!
If it's just the template that you're seeing in My Work, you can hide these items by clicking on the pin icon on the right-hand side of the Task View.
As Cassie suggests you could also set these Templates as backlogged and change the scheduling and status when you create the Project from the template. This would also help with the Report as you could choose to filter out tasks with backlogged status when building the report.
Again, please let me know if I've misunderstood this post in any way 😇