In order to reduce rule maintenance when team members change roles/responsibilities or turnover in small teams, it would be great if we could configure “queues” that notified a group of users when a task is created so that the appropriate owner could grab the task as required.
This is functionality that we have in systems like Salesforce Service Cloud and TeamDynamix. I don’t want to hire someone to be responsible for triaging our requests and I don’t want to have to remember all the places a specific person has been assigned responsibility when vacations/extended sick/departures/promotions occur.
I 100% understand accountability, but when we have three resources that share similar workload and they pick up work as they have capacity it would be great to have a team notified and or see that something needs to be “grabbed” from their my tasks section.
The main point I’m trying to avoid is hardcoding a specific user name into a rule(s) that would be updated as responsibilities change. If I could reference a queue or team then I would only need to maintain which users belong to that queue or team.
This would be beneficial in my organization as well. We have several team members with the same skill set and role, who work out of a shared job queue.
This works fine in our main queue where we intake job tickets via form and team members pick up jobs as they have capacity, but we do have some subtasks which need to be owned by someone on the team other than the main task assignee - someone who will operate as an internal reviewer of the main task assignee’s work.
Leaving the assignment field blank for these subtasks doesn’t provide the team with the same level of notification/urgency as having an assigned due date showing up in My Tasks. Having the ability to assign a task to a team or role would alleviate the need to try and figure out which of the team members has the bandwidth to address these sometimes urgent subtasks, and then assign them individually.
While I appreciate the concept of individual accountability, forcing tasks to only be assigned to individuals can create extra and unnecessary amounts of micro-level management in organizational situations where the overall workload is shared rather than divided.
Note: Not a solution but marked as such to elevate a key reply
Until/if your request is implemented (which I would bet may never happen!)…
Asana is pretty much set up to handle this with projects.
You set up a membership only at the project level, perhaps with notifications for tasks added, and make the assumption that tasks in this project are “assigned” to that group when the Assignee field is blank.
For subtasks, you could use Tab+P to add those as project-level tasks (perhaps kept in a Hidden Subtasks collapsed section at the bottom of the project) so they too could participate in the approach.