Create User Role for templates.

We have templates for all of the projects but find it tedious to assign each individual person to tasks, especially if we have to make a switch to staffing. Is there a way to template the ā€˜job titleā€™ assigned to each task and link the person to that particular job title?

For example, we have a team leader, analyst, lawyer, associate, and designer on each project. Each task is performed by the same ā€˜job titleā€™ from project to project, but the person performing this role may differ. (We have multiple analysts, lawyers, designers, etc. from which to choose for a given project).

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Asana doesnā€™t have roles like you describe, but if you choose Copy Project or Copy Task you can check the box to carryover the assignees from the project/task youā€™re copying. This lets you plug in actual names on templates and keep those names when you use the template.

Iā€™d be curious howā€™d youā€™d use roles. If you copy the role youā€™d still have to assign it to a person, so Iā€™m not sure how it would save time. You could always put notes like ā€œ[ASSIGN TO DESIGNER]ā€ in the name of the task in the template.

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Thanks for the response.

Each role has 10-15 tasks per project. With a roles feature, weā€™d have to assign people to 4-5 roles vs. 40-60 tasks. 10x time savings!

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It would be helpful in templates to be able to assign a user role rather than an individual or leave it blank. For example, for a client onboarding project template assign tasks to a role of Account Manager and Client Service Rep. Then when the template is used to be able to assign the roles to specific people.

This would minimize having to update templates when someone leaves the company or every time you use the template to remember who is assigned which item.

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Hi @Sara_Skowronski, welcome to the Asana Community Forum and thanks for sharing your feedback with us! We already have a thread on this topic so Iā€™ve gone ahead and merged your thread with the main request to centralize feedback!

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@Emily_Roman , this feature is crucial and should be added! I agree with @Sara_Skowronski. Being able to assign a role to specific tasks in a project template would save on time and it would be much easier to manage when thereā€™s employee turn over.

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Emily, is there any future plans to incorporate this feature?

+1 for a customize role feature in Asana. This way I could label the members about what org/business line they represent. Currently, I donā€™t see that as an optionā€¦

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I work as a production manager for a small film company. When creating templates for our various types of videos (short, long, event, etc.) I want to assign tasks to general roles of the project (production manager, editor, camera 1, Audio Mixer). Then when I use the template for a project, I can assign a person to each role and those tasks will be assigned to them. If I use the template for a different project with a different crew, I can simply assign different people those roles and bam, smooth sailing.

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Because the new Overview tab has roles, maybe this is coming next! :man_shrugging:

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Other PM tools have a feature that I find very helpful. When building out a template instead of putting a person on the task level you can put a role - for example, Designer, Copywriter, SEO etc.

Once itā€™s time to convert the template to a project you can then assign a team member to each task by assigning them to the role. Once assigned to the role ex: Ashley = Designer they would be automatically added to every task that has that role currently assigned. This saves time and if resources change you can easily change out the resource without touching every task. You would just change the resource at the role level.

Is there anything in the words for this coming to Asana?

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I really like that idea!! +1

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We recently launched project roles in the project overview tab so hopefully we will be able to also implement this in templates and assign tasks automatically! Thanks for sharing your feedback, @Chelsea_C! We also have an existing thread for this request so Iā€™ve merge them to consolidate comments.

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Where can I learn more information about assigning to roles instead of individuals? This would be great for us. Thank you.

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You canā€™t, unless creating a dropdown custom field for example with roles. You could also create fake accounts, each one being a role. You could also multi-home a task into a ā€œrole bucketā€, a project people with that role will check out regularly.

But, at the moment, Asana is really about assigning to someone specific.

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I want to echo the need to be able to assign roles to tasks and then assign a person to a role for templates. This would be a huge time saver.

+1

This request isnā€™t (at least entirely) about assigning to more than one person. With a template, you donā€™t know which team members will be working on a project so at the Template stage you canā€™t always assign to one person.

But once you create a project from that template you need to be able to assign the specific person who will be doing the tasks efficiently.

For those who want a workaround:
Add a custom field to your template called Role. Write in the role you want assigned to each task. Once you create a project from the template, sort by the Role column (not within sections) and you can quickly multi-select all the tasks for each role and assign to the appropriate person.

This is indeed the unofficial workaround for this use case :+1:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEAES can we get some roles defined during the templates so we can assign resources dynamically.

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