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Notify Dependent Task Assignee That Predecessor Task Has Been Completed

Thor Leach
edited 12/09/19 in Archived 2016 Posts

Here's the setup:

 

I'm trying to get team members to use Smartsheet more. One of the ways I'd like them to use it, is to get them to mark a task as complete once it's been completed instead of me chasing them around and asking them if they've completed the task and then checking it off for them. I'd also like to automate the notification of the assignee of a dependant task that the predecessor has been completed (again, so I don't have to be the guy walking around asking people if their TPS reports are done or notifying them when someone else's TPS report has been completed).

 

1) It would of course be very simple to set up a notification that can be sent to a predefined group of users every time any task is completed, but I've found that this creates a lot of automated emails notifying a lot of people without a need to know and just results in everyone ignoring all of the notifications.

 

2) I could also manually create reminders for each task so that would reminders would be sent to the employee responsible for the next task. This would work, but would be time consuming.

 

3) I could add another contact list column called "Next Task Assignee" (or whatever) to each sheet a and set a sheet level reminder to ping that person when the preceding task is complete.

 

Number 3 would work and be pretty easy to implement and manage, but the assignee for the next task is already defined in my Assigned To column for that next task and the predecessor is already defined in my Predecessor column. I just can't figure out a way to write a formula that can pull the Predecessor information from it's own row and check that against the Complete/Not Complete status of that predecessor's row. 

 

Has anyone else written a formula to automate this kind of notification? Would anyone else find this useful?

 

And on that note, is there a repository of user written formulas where we can all share our hard work so others don't have to work so hard? I've got a coupld pretty good custom embed code generators (and I'm going to be improving them soon) if anyone's looking for something like that...

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