Assign multiple assignees on one task

I don’t have an update at the moment @William_O_Donnell but I’ll make sure to keep you posted if I hear anything different in the future!

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Kaitie - please let your team know that lack of this feature is a deal breaker for our company. We were just getting ready to purchase Asana when we realized in our test that you can’t assign multiple people to the same task. The way you have it set up with multiple copies of the same project where you can’t have a group chat is no good at all. You need multiple people assigned to the same task with a “Task owner (or owners)” and “Participants”.

Thanks for the link to the blog post. What a horrible and ridiculous vision. Instead of listening to their customers’ complaints and giving them what they want (and it’s a very common complaint), they have the gall to tell customers they’re wrong. No business from our company, that’s for sure!

Hi @Craig_Bond. Marie here from Asana, I’m the new Community Forum Manager, and if you don’t mind I’ll jump in for Kaitie on this one.

I appreciate your point of view and understand the frustration here. Rest ensured that we do monitor feedback on this thread as well as all other #productfeedback on the Community Forum and always take them on board when making changes or new decisions. To be honest, I don’t believe we’re planning to introduce a “multiple assignee” feature in the near term as it doesn’t align with our vision (Why one assignee?), but that doesn’t mean we will never reconsider this option.

We always try to make the best decisions for Asana and its users, but we’re aware they might not always work for everyone; that’s why we want to make sure to give you some space to provide your feedback (Community Forum) and some context on why we’re making this decision (blog article). I know this doesn’t solve your issue, but I hope it brought a bit of clarity and context. And in the meantime, you have an entire Community willing to share how they have made the “single assignee” feature work for their Organization; there a few tips on this thread, but feel free to ask more specific questions if you need to! I would also encourage you to check out this handy post to learn more about our Guidelines: FAQ - Asana Community Forum.

All the best Craig!

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A couple thoughts here. Add the option and let the customers decide how to use it. Put it in as something only the owner of the account can turn on or off for the account to meet the needs of the business.

Another would be to at least sync the copy of assigned tasks so the 2 or more people assigned to the shared task can see each others comments and attachments added.

There has to be some type of compromise from Asana. We just purchased Asana and love it even knowing this particular deficiency, I do say it is a deficiency.

By not doing something to satisfy such a wanted request Asana is actually breaking our desired workflow and impeding the use of tasks in the situations where we want multiple people assigned to a task. Reading why Asana has chosen not to do it is actually counter intuitive. If I have multiple assigned to the task I have more eyes on the task, as a manager that makes more sense. I as a manager will take the responsibility of ownership not Asana.

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Really want to see in the future that Asana can allow to assign multiple person to one task when you have persons from different organizations, but work on the same task. In that case, everyone can track their assigned task. Adding as collaborator does not shown up in “my task”.

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Hi @Jian_Mao,
I’ve moved your post to this feature request to that you wish can be counted by our team.

I encourage you to read through some posts :point_up: above :point_up: , where we’ve provided explanations for why a single Task can only have a single assignee, in addition to some workarounds that I think you’ll find helpful :slight_smile:

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Thanks for moving me to this post. As read through above emails, realize this is a critical feature for all, not only me. But kind of disappointed per explanation of “it doesn’t align with our vision”. This has been one of trouble some features since I started using Asana one year ago. I love Asana, but wish it can get this fixed.

I see that Asana allows you to assign a task to multiple people, but the task is forked, meaning that each one becomes its own task with its own history.
I need to be able to have multiple people assigned the same task, but with it still being just one task (only with multiple assignees) with a shared history (comment history, task description, etc) from that point forward. Using the collaborators approach leaves something to be desired.
If this feature already exists, please point me to it.

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Hi @Josh_A,

Asana has a assumption, that I agree, that all tasks should have an unique owner. The idea behind this is that if there’s a shared responsibility, you lose accountability, which decreases the chance of the task or project being completed (Why one assignee?).

When I face this kind of responsibility distribution, I create subtasks with parts of the task that each people must deliver. Then, people are still aligned by the mother tasks, however with each one knowing what’s expected from them.

Hope it helps!

Best,
Millor

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I agree, @Millor_Machado

If I assigned a task to 3 different people, I guarantee they’d all assume the others were responsible for completing it. I prefer to have one person to go and talk to when things haven’t gone to plan. Subtasks are definitely the way to go.

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Hi guys! Just merging this thread with Assign multiple assignees on one task to gather all feedback on one thread!

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I can support the “design” choice perspective of one assignee per task, but why not give users the ability to have other team member’s tasks show up in their personal task feed? Not as an assignee but as a viewer. For people like me who are both managers of employees AND head-down task oriented at the same time, I spend much of my day in the “my tasks” view. It would be extremely helpful to have certain important tasks assigned to other team members in that same dashboard view, if that makes sense, without having to switch pages or views. “Multi-tasking” is the death of productivity for many people, and switching around to different views all the time just that.
It could easily be done by allowing someone to add a task their “my tasks” view but not as an assignee, only as a collaborator. It would be the same as a collaborator, except it would put the task in their “my tasks” view as well so they can see it from that view.
This would help me very much. I wonder how many others it would help.

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Another request: add “edit comment” to this forum so that when I make grammar errors like in my comment above, I can get in and edit them. :rofl:

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It seems you’re stuck on a card being a “task”. But on teams who have multiple projects, each of which has different combinations of the same people, it can be powerful to “assign” more than one person to a card that represents something more than a task, simply to help with an understanding of shared responsibility.

A good example might be a card representing a website redesign. We’d have one board that maps where the PROJECT is… and WHO is on it. That project card should be showing multiple faces. But because of this limitation, it can’t. Right now, your app doesn’t let us do that. I can’t look at my board and say “what’s Sobhana working on” because I can only see one face per project, even though many projects involve many people.

What’s more: please keep in mind that there is a very rich layer of organic and organizational knowledge that your app can’t see: when you see two assignees, you may not realize that one is the director of a team and the other is an employee with a specific set of responsibilities. Over here, in the actual working team, WE know who has what responsibility – we use ASANA to help us execute on those, so we don’t need actually need you to be making choices about how we structure the notifications your app provides us, or the workflow representations your app allows us to use (which are amazing, in general).

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Addenda:

  1. You know, it would be very cool if on any particular card (at any particular level of the subtask tree) you could get an aggregate display of everyone working on ANY subtask. So when I put a card on a board, I see everyone implicated by that card’s process.
  2. I’d certainly love to be able to edit my comments, here, rather than post replies to myself :wink:

I’d even take that one step further: if you ever have a task that you don’t want to be completed, assign it to a group rather than a single person. I’m very confident that approach will turn out successfull :slight_smile:

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Hi @Josh_A

Do you have a premium account? I was just thinking that a workaround would be to do an advanced search for all tasks that you’re following, then save the report on the sidebar. Any time you wanted to see a list of all of the tasks you’re following, you could click on it. I know it’s an extra click and it takes you out of My Tasks, but it’s pretty close to what you’re asking for.

By the way, you gain the permission to edit your posts after you’ve posted a certain number of times (I can’t remember the exact number . . . @Marie?), so keep engaging with the Community!

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Absolutely! The curse of committees. :slight_smile:

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Thanks, Mark_Hudson. I’ll give that a try. Every little bit helps. The fewer the clicks, the better I feel. :slight_smile:

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