Using Rules to assign a task to a person in the task's custom People field.

[anon55373545]

Wondering if there’s any secret methods or alternatives beyond what I’m trying to achieve with what I’d call “Auto-task Assignment”. The use case here is that I’d like tasks to automatically be reassigned to the person that has been working on the task without manual intervention.

Here’s the flow

1. A task is added to a project with no assignee
2. When the task is assigned, the assignee is “copied” to a custom People field via Rules, in this example, that’s “Content Designer”. (Figure A)
3. The assignee completes the task and the task moves to another project via Rules, where the assignee is cleared for the next department to pick up and repeat the above process.
4. When/if that task returns to the project, the assignee will be automatically populated using a second rule that applies the Assignee based on the name in the “Content Designer” People field, which was populated from the initial rule in step 2. (Figure B)

The problem I have is that it appears I need to make these two rules for every content designer that uses this project, which will very quickly exhaust the 50 rule limit/project.

I suspect I’m looking for a feature that doesn’t yet exist that is along the lines of:
Trigger:
Custom People Field contains ANY user

Action:
Assign Task to the user in Custom People field

Any other ideas welcome!!
Thanks

Figure A

Figure B

[Phil_Seeman]

FYI you could do this via our Flowsana integration.

For the first rule, you’d use a text custom field, not a people field - let’s call it Original Assignee. Then the Flowsana rule would be “If a task is assigned to anyone, then set the Original Assignee custom field to {task.Assignee}”. (The curly braces utilize our Variable Substitution capability.)

Then the second rule would be “If [whatever trigger condition you’re going to use to signify the task returning to the project], then assign the task to the value in the custom field Original Assignee”.