Assign multiple assignees on one task

[Xiao_Fan]

@Vanessa_N what if instead of multiple assignees, asana added concepts of “Owner” and “Needs work from”?

For example, in our current process, devs manage feature delivery (and are thus always, appropriately, owners on given tasks), but at various points it would be useful for that dev to be able to add others to “actively work” on a task. For example, for code reviews, or manual testing.

As has been mentioned previously, this can be done with subtasks. However, subtasks don’t show up on boards, and are therefore harder to track for the assignee.

I suppose, rather than adding one more voice to the chorus asking for multiple assignees, let me phrase this a different way-- what is the best way to solve my particular use case?

• I would like a dev to be the owner, and see it on our shared board when they filter down to “just my tasks”.
• I would like to be able to assign additional people to some kind of “needs attention” bucket, and have this task also show up for these people when they filter to “just my tasks”

This way everyone has the same nice unified task-management view

[Lennart1]

Right now testing if Asana would be a cool solution for our PM (commercial film production company). With this feature missing - not cool!! I see the point of “one person responsible” for a task - but we definitely need to set multiple team members “participating”.

[Vanessa_N]

Hi @Xiao_Fan, welcome to the Forum and thank you for reaching out. I completely understand your point and really appreciate your detailed feedback telling us your use case and the solution you would like to see.

To be honest, we don’t have any changes to this feature planned for the near future, but your suggestion is great, and I am sure our Developers would love to review it. I have since forwarded your feedback to our Product team for consideration.

As a workaround, you can use Tags to point the Owners of the tasks, and the assignee field to point the users who will actively work on these tasks. I know this is not a permanent solution, as only the assignee would see the task in their “My Tasks” list, but it might help unblock your workflow for now.

Apologies for the trouble. I hope this workaround helps! If there’s anything else we can do for you, please let us know!

[Pelhamesque]

My issue is that I am using Asana as a project management tool, rather than the task management tool from which it developed. As a freelance PM for small creative businesses, I work with teams composed of other freelancers. Asana is robust enough to handle project management without the overkill of a complex tool like MS Project and it offers a lot of flexibility and great features for the online world in which I reside. Tracking budgets and actual costs is a challenge. I use custom fields for hours and costs. Since various resources have different costs, I need to assign the actual work to the people performing that work to get actual costs. Assigning multiple resources would simplify the process a great deal.

[Stu_Smith]

Because it’s also about accountability. Know who is responsible is imperative for project management.

[Francesco_Alessi]

I still come across the need to do this every day. I hate creating too many tasks, as the system seems to work slower the more stuff we throw at it. I have gone to more of a team-task concept, but where that fails is in the notifications.

So we have a meeting of our commissioners that we have to televise. No less than 7 people will work on some portion of this. And it could be up to 12 people at times. Sure, I could make a project for something that happens every other week (and this isn’t just the only one of these meetings, it’s just the biggest). What works is creating a project for all the meetings, and having ONE TASK per meeting. Then having all the team members log their time on it via Everhour. But what is kind of lame is they have to seek out the task, since I don’t assign it to them. So they don’t get reminders, it doesn’t show up in their task lists, etc.

I completely understand the concept of someone being responsible. But to make Asana more efficient, it would be nice if we could have some sort of team concept. Others have mentioned “owner” vs “need” or “team” or “assistance.”

So let’s say we can’t get to this point of multiple assignees. Could you do something like “backups.” For example, I assign Staff-X as the primary assignee. But I also assign Staff-Y as backup-1, and Staff-Z as backup-2.

Now, maybe these “backup tasks” show up slightly differently to those users. Maybe it’s essentially the same as the “Today” “Upcoming” “Later” thing and you just add one in there call “Backup” They would see all the notifications and conversations, but they would know they don’t need to act until maybe some point has passed. Whether this point is built in by the person who assigned the tasks, or something they just know, then backup-1 would know to take over this task. Ultimately, I would even be fine with any of the people completing the task.

So if the primary is working on the task, the backups see everything, but they know they don’t need to get involved. But then the primary is out sick for days, and now a backup has to take over, so he can shift from backup mode to primary mode and now the primary will shift to backup.

I really haven’t thought who gets the credit and the glory for finishing the task. If the primary did 80% of the task and the backup did 20%, I’m not sure how that would be represented if I was to pull a report.

I totally get why this “multiple assignee” feature is taking so long to get implemented… it’s a tough one, has lots of options and everyone will want something slightly different.

[Francesco_Alessi]

After writing all that… it kind of got me thinking that the easiest way and the way that I think it would have the least impact on everyone is to create that additional section in everyones “My Tasks” area.

Basically, there could be multiple sections:
New Items
Today
Upcoming
Later
Backup
Watching

So the other sections are already there, but adding something like “backup” and “watching” would allow us to add staff to tasks so they can interact with it easier, and not have to search or seek it out.

This seems like a simple addition and it wouldn’t really impact much. It’s not what everyone is looking for, but I think this would at least be a stop-gap until something more elaborate could be created.

[Natalie_Karnatak]

What’s the problem with just allowing us to add multiple assignees if we want, and then those who want to stick to the “one assignee only” model can still do so? Everyone’s happy! I don’t get why this is being enforced by the software.

[Chris_Harford]

My company often needs to QC product. Our current lead of that will create a task with a link to our QC form for each product then tag each person when she needs them to respond.

The problem for many of us who are QCing the product is that its hard to remember which we have or have not responded to. To circumvent this I was thinking it would be an amazing feature if Asana would allow assigning of tasks to MULTIPLE people. Let me assign one task to 20 people so that the task shows up as a task for each one of them and they know which they have completed or haven’t completed.

I’m assuming there isn’t a way to already do this as when I search “multiple task creation” or anything similar here its people asking for it but that’s it. I really think a feature like this would be immensely helpful…

[Stephen_Patterson]

Can do! Here’s what you’re looking for Chris!

[Chris_Harford]

Ah there we go! I was looking in the area while creating the task. Didn’t think to look after the task was already created!

Thanks for the reply and help!

[Alexandr]

Add one more vote to this. Assigning a copy is a nice-n-quick “plaster” to get around the issue, but it makes projects more cluttered with the same task. Imagine a project where 10x or more task need to be assigned to 3 people on average… Real functional multiple-assign would be really helpful.

Thank you!

[Atthakorn]

I vote this feature too, multiple assignees is very useful for many situations

Schedule Meeting
we can just adapt to use Asana as Calendar to schedule any meeting without to switch between Asana and Outlook

Single Task with Multiple responsible persons
Some tasks required more than people to proceed, we can discuss and complete the task in only one thread - sub tasks / copied task is too overwhelming

[QuinnFan]

I’ve been waiting for the multiple assignee feature for too long. So I kinda gave up.
Yesterday when I browsed the internet and found this list: Top 12 best task management software for creative teams 2023 (free and paid), I immediately signed up for another Asana alternative.

Can’t wait for too long.

[EljVek]

This needs to be implemented. We’ve waited too long.

[Kemar_Atkins]

Any update on this, with major projects, someone we need to add multiple people on specific tasks.

[Luke_Sieber]

I just signed up for Asana… I can’t believe this isn’t a feature. Honestly I might just bite the bullet and spend the time recreating everything in Quire. For some things, I don’t care who does it as long as it gets done. It’s 2019, this feature has been requested for years. Why should I use a platform that doesn’t meet my needs? It’s embarrassing that I only find out the program can’t do this after spending a few hours entering and organizing everything… unbelievable. Asana has the ability as the choice architect to encourage best practices, but that doesn’t mean they should make them do things a particular way. Soft paternalism isn’t a new concept.

[Marc_D]

It’s crazy that this still isn’t a feature… I get the philosophical concept behind the decision, but I think it’d also be fair to let users choose whether or not they want to abide by it. I’m usually creating tasks from this app. It’s a nice workaround to assign tasks to multiple people and it also lets me update Slack simultaneously, but obviously it can’t overcome the limitations of Asana itself…

[Stephanie_Oberg]

I’m curious about the multiple assignee per task model. Would there be an expectation that if a task is assigned to N people, all N must complete the task? Or would the default be that completion by one closes the task for all? (I see people talking about both above.) Or, would people want that choice (“complete by all” vs. “complete by any”) to be a setting? If so, would it be global to a team or per project, or maybe decided task by task?

[Lindsay_Peets]

I literally just want to be able to assign a single copy of a task to multiple people in the case that it only has to be done once but could be done by any one individual of a number of people. It would appear as an option in all those people’s My Tasks and disappear once the the first person marks it completed. Enough with the philosophy question, please. Let it be a toggle feature if this is such an issue. Thanks!