My team (on a paid plan) needs to keep a historical record of which team members owned project tasks, even after they’ve leave the organization. From what I’ve seen, when you remove a member from a team or a project, all records of their name are removed. We don’t want that. Is there a way to keep those completed tasks associated with the team member, but also ensure that team member is no longer able to access projects or participate in teams?
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Hi, @Francesco_Vella
I understand your request.
In that case, it seems that the following will be the situation. Can you confirm?
“The person assigned to tasks or collaborators can be removed from the project or team, but they will still be displayed as is.”
(In my environment, it appears as described above.)
That’s correct. In my environment, when someone leaves the team and we deactivate their account or remove them from the team, any tasks they disappear from any tasks they previously completed, so we have no record of them ever having completed them. From what I’ve seen elsewhere, Asana suggests reassigning those tasks to an active team member, but that destroys our historical record and honestly makes no sense to me.
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When I remove team members from Asana, I first do a search to find all their tasks then assign each of those tasks a tag with that team member’s name. This was the process recommended to me by the Asana rep I worked with when setting up our company.
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I’m aware of this solution, but I don’t think it’s a great solution. While I fully expect to reassign open tasks when someone leaves a team, it’s nonsense that my only two options are to reassign their completed tasks or to just live with the fact that I have no historical record of who actually completed the work. What should happen is that their completed tasks retain their name so that if anyone needs to look back at the project history in 6 months, we know who it was assigned to and completed the work. I shouldn’t have to reassign completed tasks to people who weren’t responsible for completing them.
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Sherrill - I’m reviewing this chain and I am wondering if I can leverage your expertise to help me. I wuld like to remove team members to reduce the seat count but I am concerned that their tasks or peojects will delete along with them. I have opened a case but have not heard back. In some cases, they were project admins or asana admins.
Nicole - The tasks and projects won’t be deleted but they will become unassigned. Here’s a help article that might help. https://help.asana.com/hc/en-us/articles/23064620068763-Managing-members-in-an-organization#gl-deactivating
Before I delete a user, I do a search for all tasks assigned to that person, I tag them with the person’s name (so I know who they used to belong to) then I re-assign them to someone else. When that is done, I’ll remove the user. Asana will prompt you and you can also create a project with all the tasks for that person.
As for projects, I’ve noticed that users who’ve I’ve removed are still listed as project owners. Not sure why that is. You also have to be aware of permissions. All our projects are set up as shared with the Team so I can easily search for all tasks by assignee.
Welcome, @Nicole_Popovich,
In addition to the good reply above, you may be interested in this general treatment I wrote:
Thanks,
Larry
Larry - THANK YOU! That is incredibly nice. I’ll go through it today and give it a try. So appreciated!
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Is there any way to get this in front of developers or product managers? As the original poster states, it is really insane that if someone leaves the default behavior is that you lose the entire record of what they worked on. It’s absurd to recommed we go through and manually tag each of their tasks with their names on it. For some people this is a lot of tasks and you can only select a small number of tasks at a time without asana yelling at you. Why can’t you just keep the original users name on it for tasks they’ve completed? This is a big problem in our organization that keeps happening over and over again and is very frustrating.
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Also I guess to clarify, what the original post and I seem to be talking about is the task history, not so much projects. If we have an employee that has completed 1000 tasks and they leave, the default is we just lose all record of what they completed unless we manually spend a bunch of time trying to record what asana already knows?
I made a feature request topic for this here: Keep User Names on Completed Tasks After Removing Members
Hi, everyone! Thank you for this conversation. Our PMO team just noticed that if we want to remove a member from our team, Asana will give a message saying the member will be removed from all projects they are on. We don’t want this to happen. Is adding a tag to all tasks they are on still the only solution to keeping the member on the projects, or should we just add the organization as a team and/or make the projects public, so that member still has access to the projects?
I wish removing a team member offered a choice, but sadly it doesn’t.
Updating all the tasks isn’t the best solution, I feel, because it is a lot of work, and will not offer access for new tasks added to projects where access was otherwise lost.
What I would do is prepare a list (you may need to use one or more advanced searches) to understand those projects where this user will lose access. With that list in place, remove the user from the team, since it sounds like you want to do that, then project-by-project add the user back, or resolve that in some other manner, like adding other team(s) to those projects if that makes it easier, or making them public as you mentioned, if that’s appropriate. It depends how you want to manage access rights and teams and projects membership overall.
Thanks,
Larry
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Thank you so much, @lpb ! We will take your advice. Have a great week, and much success!
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