Assign multiple assignees on one task

I appreciate that. I can see how in some cases this could be a workable substitute, but I don’t like the added steps and how it necessitates creation of a separate “container” project for each involved team. Thanks for the workaround though!

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Maybe your case is different, but usually the shared task is already in a project where the potential assignees are members, so the only change is for those who might pick up tasks to monitor their Asana notifications for potential tasks.

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Assigning multiple people to one task is a terrible idea. One person, one task, works great. How do I know this? I’ve been forced to abandon Asana by my company, and use a different tool that allows you to assign multiple people to one task.

The outcome?

It’s totally unclear who’s responsibility it is to update or complete the task, and more often than not it simply gets left open. We have to do this because the “competitors” tool doesn’t allow you to add people as “followers”. This is a great feature, and means multiple people can work on a single task, but one person has overall ownership of it.

TLDR: Please Asana, don’t change your UI to allow multiple people to own tasks, it fosters confusion, decreases accountability and leads to an overall worse experience when it comes to managing work.

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We don’t see the need to assign a task to multiple people, but it’d be awesome to easily add a team as a follower/collaborator to get task updates and not have to add everyone one by one (and likely miss someone).

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Hi Kaitie,

reading the feedback of Asana Users shows that there is a great demand for this option. I understand your way of thinking (being one person responsible). However should this not be an option that can be switched on/off by the Admin?

I would really appreciate if you could think about this. The biggest problem is that there are several “common recurring tasks” that can/should be done by all employees. But this task now only shows up in the “My Tasks List” for the one responsible and therefore being less/not visible for the followers.

Thank you in advance for considering adding the option to let the Asana Admin decide if it should be possible to add more than one repsonsible person to a task.

Regards,

Roy

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Hi,

please tell me which alternative you are using. Because we need this option.

Thank you in advance.

Yes, Asana, add this feature already. We can figure out or own philosophy of task assignment and you could even add an account setting that allows/disallows this. The people have spoken.

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lol, they blocked my post. hope they read it first and took the feedback. seems unlikely.

Chiming in here, though it’s surprising that after 3 years of requests for this feature Asana hasn’t listened to feedback.

My organization is piloting Asana and not being able to assign multiple people to the same task is a major drawback. I’ve read through all the posts explaining why Asana has chosen to do it this way, but what strikes me is that all those explanations have a fairly one-dimensional view of how organizations are using tasks. If assigning to multiple people creates confusion and lack of accountability at your company, then simply limit one task per person (or better yet, Asana should introduce a feature where this can be toggled on or off at the teams level).

But a lot of us would find it useful, and have good reasons for wanting it. To give a real-life example: We are implementing a new IT system, and one of the tasks is filling out a spreadsheet with multiple sheets. There are a couple people responsible for filling it out – while I’m managing the overall project, they have to divvy up the sheets among themselves, which then go into subtasks. Quite simply, this is a task that cannot be assigned to one person. So rather than simply assigning it to the people involved, I have ended up leaving it blank and emailing the team members explaining what to do. Which rather defeats the purpose of Asana. I’m not so worried about the tasks appearing in team members’ task lists or not – people at my organization are generally very conscientious of managing their deadlines and responsibilities. What I do care about is the higher level view, so people can see who is responsible for what, there are clearly defined areas of responsibility (even if it is shared with a teammate) and everyone has all the information, including attachments, discussions, etc., in one place.

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Hi Kristine, curious what other tools you are assessing? I am running into similar issues regarding assign multiple people. We always work in pairs in all out projects.

I’m not sure I can recommend another product on an Asana chat, but I have tested out another platform which has this feature. If you google “who should do this” + task management app it will be at the top of the search results.

Thanks for the hint. I will run it :wink: through google.

Such as?

The logic is, two people can’t occupy the same space. Nor can two people be responsible for outcome at the same time without causing conflict. ‘Oh, I thought you were doing that’

You can’t have two people working on the exact same effort. If two people are responsible for different components of that effort, use subtasks to divide out.

If two people are assigned to get lunch you are either assuming both are driving, both are paying, and both are carrying the food back. When in fact ‘Get Lunch’ contains -Drive to pickup lunch -pay for lunch -drive back -distribute food.

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For us a direct example is that we have tasks like our PHONE MESSAGES auto send into Asana and assign to the store manager. If the store manager is off that day, the task may sit if a follower does not see it and take action.

If we could CO-Assign the task, and then Co-Assign to an asst manager, they could see it faster and take direct action to complete the task right away.

We have many other examples, but this was one specifically that is frustrating since the automation is there and the coding to make this possible is simple!

I presume you are using rules to add collaborators and comments to pull others in?

Yes we have it set so that it will hit their inbox. It is just a case where we would prefer it auto assigned to BOTH managers and whoever is on that day could take it. The other thing that could work is if the Automation could be set up to assign to specific people on specific days. That would be another potential fix.

perhaps you can have one generic email for both managers for this instance whereby both use that to log into Asana or do email forwarding and have Asana send email notifications?

We use Asana for pretty much running our entire business, so the managers need their own accounts.

In many case, when creating a task, we have many individuals that are capable of completing the task. Choosing one to complete the task is arbitrary.

In other tools, where selecting multiple assignees is an option, we use this field as more of a “nomination” to complete the task. Once one of the individuals has selected the task to begin work (And moved it further to the right in our Kanban board), they will remove all of the other names from assignees and take full ownership.

I realize that we can assign multiple people as collaborators, but other folks that would not complete the work might also want to follow the task, and then there would no distinction between those who can complete the work and those who are just following.

Also, when looking at a project, you only see the owner, not the collaborator, in the card view. And you can only filter by assignee, not by collaborator.

The “Assign Team” idea as suggested above would help out in a lot of cases, but even then the skills needed may not be shared by an entire team.

We would really appreciate the ability to assign more than one person, and would prefer conventions rather than system limitations to clearly understand who owns a task.

Thanks!

Matt

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This example is good, but it assumes that we care to track all these simple smaller actions, or that they are defined in advance, or that they are going to be tracked on that same card. All these are assumptions that work for certain jobs, not others.

As per your example, the task “Get food” can have an owner, and multiple people on the same car. As a manager, I don’t care who carries what, and I don’t want to micromanage everyone to break down and assign individual tasks to themselves — that would be ridiculous. All I care is that the car goes there, comes back with the food. And I’ve an owner, and collaborators for that.

Or maybe it’s a massive drive and the car has to be built from scratch, and then I have a separate Asana board to track all these tasks, assign people, and so on, but at a high level? I care only about that single card in the original project board with… an owner, and multiple people assigned.

I’m all in favor of Asana principle to have a single owner for tasks (it’s a principle I follow and teach myself), but using that a justification to not allow assigning other people isn’t correct. A single owner can exist at the same time as having other people working on the same task: the two aren’t at odds.

This is not about ignoring that principle. This is about allowing flexibility of the granularity for the chosen task WHILE preserving that principle.

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