Assign To - multiple people

Hi, I'm a new Smartsheet user and am also the Sys Admin and support person here in my institution.

After some initial teaching, someone asked about assigning a task to multiple people. I thought maybe that would be Assign To a group.

However, something tells me that Smartsheet does not allow assign to multiple people based on sheer logic.

Should I be looking for an assign to multiple persons workaround? Multiple Assign To columns? Or again, is this simply not a logical or sound way of approaching this?

Thank you.

Whitney Hengesbach

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Contacts

Groups and Group Management

Comments

Mike Wilday

You are correct in your assessment that Smartsheets does not allow you to assign to multiple individuals. We have circumvented this using exactly the same methods as you have suggested, creating an additional assignee column. Good luck and don't hesitate to let the community know if you have any questions.

Andrea B

Hi Whitney

I get around this by creating a parent task and then one sub task for each of the individuals each set up as Start to Start tasks so they all have the same duration.

Hope this helps

Mike Wilday

That is a great solution as well. How do you manage comments and updates on a single task, when its separated between individuals?

Andrea B

The individuals can add comments at the parent task level or at their own level; the updates should be performed by the person the task is assigned to on their individual task.

So first decide on the length of the overall task - this will be the maximum you can assign to any of the individuals. e.g. parent task is 4 days, you can then assign a child task to each individual no longer than 4 days, but any value upto 4 days. All the child tasks will have start and end dates within or equal to the parent task. As each person updates their task with % completion, this automatically calculates the overall % completion. This allows you to assign different length tasks to the individuals within the overall time band - see the attached file.

jacobwulff

Hi - I really hoped this could be the new way of planning..

I cannot understand why this feature is not available. We use MS Project very much for both smaller and larger projects. A project plan can have over 500 lines - each line with multiple resources, e.g. 10 people on some of them.

So the work-around with multiple lines makes would make the plan even larger.

Please consider implementing it, e.g. and seperate with commas, just like MS Project.

Until then, I will search for alternatives.

RyanSCampbell

Sounds like this was just announced in the 2018 Engage Keynote!

Mike Wilday

I can confirm that it was! And is available.

Right click on your contact column and choose Edit Properties.
Select the checkbox for allowing multiple contacts.
Save and then you can select more than one contact in your contact field.

J. Craig Williams

Be careful:

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/bugs-sumifs-does-not-find-multiple-users