Rule to update assignee based on a custom people field?

Hello! I’m creating a workflow for processes that will have different sets of stakeholders for each project that won’t be known ahead of time. I’m wondering if there’s a way to create a rule that will update the assignee of a task to a name that is inputted in another custom “people” field? It would be great to have this logic set up ahead of time to avoid having to manually update rules for each new project once stakeholders are known.

Thanks!

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Hi @Kindra_Warren

If I am understanding correctly, this does exist!

Action: People Custom field - “Contains Any”
Trigger: Assign task to - Samer person you had in the people custom field

Please see screenshot below:

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Welcome, @Kindra_Warren,

I think you’re asking to update Assignee to the current value of a custom people-type field. I’m afraid not (yet) in native Asana, though you may be able to do this in flowsana.net (@Phil_Seeman).

Larry

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Not yet - working on it!

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It should be said that Flowsana.net works perfectly well for setting the assignee based on a value/option of a ‘single-select’ field (instead of a ‘people’ field). All you have to do is make sure that the values/options are the people’s names and typed exactly the same as their Asana profile so that this rule works properly.

Indeed, some maintenance is required to keep the field’s values (names of people) updated manually as people are added/removed from your organisation. But that’s only until Flowsana supports the ‘People’ field as @Phil_Seeman mentions… can’t wait!

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hello, I am having the same challenge. I installed flowsana but I am still not able to set a rule ‘if custom field is set to x’ assign it to ‘custom field’ (which is a single-select dropdown of a person, as you suggested) = what am i doing wrong?

Hi @Brianna_Burnham,

@Richard_Sather was referring to a different functionality in Flowsana than you’re describing - he was talking about a rule like “If [some trigger condition happens], then assign the task to the value in custom field X”.

Can you supply some more detail about the use case you’re trying to solve for? Thanks!

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hi @Phil_Seeman thanks for the reply!

I am trying to use automation to trigger task assignment for our creative team. They have multiple assignees going through their workflow, it bounces back and forth between strategy and editing. I created a custom field called ‘strategist’ (this was a people field but i changed to single select dropdown per this forums advice) and i also have a custom field called ‘job status’. when the job status is set to ‘ready for review’, (for example) i want to assign the task back to the assigned ‘strategist’ - TL;DR - i want to be able to use the job status (a custom field) to call to the strategist column (another custom field) to set the assignee. Is this possible?

@Brianna_Burnham,

You bet, you can do that via Flowsana - that actually is the exact use case Richard was talking about!

Just build a rule: "When the field ‘Job Status’ changes to ‘ready for review’ (or to whatever value), then Assign the task to the value in the custom field ‘strategist’.

Just make sure that all of the values in the strategist dropdown list match exactly either the username or the user email address of some user in your workspace.

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Nice, it works! Thanks!

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I’d just like to +1 the idea of this being a built-in Asana feature. We’re using a custom People Field to identify a “Champion” for a given feature or bug fix. I’d like to set up a rule so that once a task is moved to the “released/needs verification” section of our project, the assignee is automatically updated to whomever has been added to the Custom People Field. (In our case, we only ever have a single champion, which probably bypasses the complexity for some folks using people fields with multiple people in it.) Flowsana isn’t an option for us, so it would be really great to have the Custom People Field be available as one of the variables that the task moved to specific section rule could be fed by.

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Agreed! I think this would be extremely helpful to have built into asana using the custom People Field to control assignee via rules. We use rules often in our organization and unfortunately that knocks being able to reassign the rule back to the original task creator because it was created by asana. It does not have a way right now to send back to the original assignee. That would be EXTREMELY helpful

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