Assign more than 1 person (or group) to a task ?

Matty

Surasak, sounds like you may have a bigger question than just how to assign multiple people in smartsheet.

 

Considering you have teams to which you can delegate tasks, consider who needs to be the person, leader, or point of contact who is responsible for the team. Ask yourself: "who would I reference as responsible should an important task not get done (or who you would praise should a great job be executed!)".

 

Alternatively, ask yourself: "should this task be broken up to the point in which each person can be clear on my expectations of them." For instance, not all people involved are going to simultaneously work on the task in the project at the same time, doing the same exact thing. To leave it up to them to figure out may cause confusion and frustration. Of course in professional project management  there is always a threshold to balance of how far you breakdown tasks of the "work breakdown structure" (i.e. all tasks should be no less than one week, one day, one month duration).

 

In saying that, if it is a very peculiar case where all people involved would be equally responsible for doing the exact same specific task--meaning that all are accountable equally for the row--consider a larger view of your processes and workflows. For instance, it may be helpful to establish a group email box to where all tasks concerning a group can be sent.

 

At the end of the day, it's very helpful to consider your resources in the form of human capital in a very specific, individual way; people have various talents and weakness, and you have very specific expectations according to each person's capabilities. This is nearly impossible to communicate to your team should you signal that you view them as a cog in the wheel of just a larger human resource.

 

Hope this helps!

In humility, 

Matty

J. Craig Williams

Well said Maty!

 

Craig

jamie.kimpton144671

Hi Alicia, 

Do you know if this has been resolved since you last posted it would be considered for future development? We need to have the ability to add more than 1 person to our 'Assigned To' or 'Contacts' column but the tool only allows us to enter in one person. Since some of our tasks are shared, we need to be able to account for our resource hours accordingly. Is there a workaround for this instead? I'm not sure I understand your suggestion of duplicating rows to assign a task to multiple users in order to track them in Resource Management. 

Thanks in advance for any help/guidance you can provide, Jamie Kimpton

Andrée Starå

Hi,

Yes, assigning multiple people to a task is now available.

Please see the attached link/screenshot for more information.

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/518335-assigning-people-to-a-task

I hope this helps you!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

--

Hi all,

We're pleased to announce that you can now quickly & easily assign tasks to multiple people. To do so, check the new "Allow multiple contacts per cell" checkbox in any contact column. The cells in that column will then allow up to 20 people to be added.

You can still leave that option unchecked when you only want a single person to be assigned to a task at a time.

Adding multiple contacts to a cell is useful not only for assigning people, but also for other scenarios where you want to associate multiple stakeholders with a row. For example, you might want those people to receive notifications when the row changes, or you may want them to appear in reports and filters.

For some projects, you may want to add 2 contact columns: one for the primary owner, and another for additional team members.

We welcome you to try it out and let us know what you think.

- Daniel