I am using a People type of custom field to track company history of who worked on what projects. However, I just realized a major problem with this use case: since I do not have direct control over the options in the field, when a user leaves our organization, they disappear from the field!
Example: I create a People-type field called “Project Lead”, and Jonesy is one of our employees. When Jonesy leaves the company, and I remove him from Asana, all tasks with the value “Jonesy” in the “Project Lead” field repopulate that field as blank. There is not even a comment in the task which shows that Asana made a change.
This is a huge problem for any kind of historical tracking. Unless Asana plans to update this and allow us to retain users in a People field when they leave the organization, I’ll just have to redo all my People fields as regular custom fields and populate them manually. :,(
Does anyone else have use cases where this will be an issue?
I voted! It would be great if Asana did something like what they do with comments by deprovisioned people; their image is lost but the name is retained for historical reasons. I’m sure that would complicate the implementation of people fields but would be appreciated and allow it to be used more often.
Update/workaround: I really like our People-type custom field and we use it extensively, so after some thinking, I decided not to convert it to a regular custom field (that would have required HOURS of manual work!)
Instead, I created a custom field called “Former employee” and added a step to my employee exit process where I’ll manually add that field to the affected tasks before removing the employee from our Asana workspace. It wouldn’t work for every use case, I’m sure, but it worked great for mine and was much simpler to implement.
I still think we should have the option to keep former members in the People custom field – just wanted to mention this workaround for anyone else who needs it.