Ability to merge tasks

I sometimes come across the situation when two (or more) different people, usually in different teams, set up separate instances of the same task. An example would be the creation of a piece of collateral for an event. The event team might set up a project for the event with a large number of tasks, one of which is to create a flyer. The content team might be independently briefed about the flyer, but not realize or notice there's already a task for it and create another one. If this isn't picked up early I end up with two tasks, each with comments, attachments, working hours, etc. from the respective teams.

I'd like to any easy way to merge two tasks, combining the comment streams, attachments, etc. There would need to be a mechanism for resolving date, status, etc. conflicts during the merge process.

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Comments

Permanently deleted user

Hi Rob! Thank you for the detailed explanation of your use case, that's some valuable information. This isn't something we're working on at the moment, but I can see how this could be helpful for the situation you described. Is this something you've noticed to happen often between teams?

Rob G Irwin

Yes, it happens regularly enough to be an issue. Because some of our teams are geographically separated and our projects are complex and often involve several different teams, it is sometimes hard to know if a particular task has been added. I maintain some governance by regularly trawling the task lists for each projects and making sure they are properly named (a separate issue for us that may also lead to tasks being duplicated) and that multiple instances of the same tasks are merged.

In the longer term I can minimise the occurrence of duplicated tasks by better educating the users, but I can imagine that this problem won't entirely disappear. So some method of merging tasks, or even just easily copying the comments stream maintaining the times and dates, would be useful.

Permanently deleted user

Rob, thanks so much for following up and providing the additional info! I can see how that could be helpful (particularly for comments).

Scott Henderson

This can also happen when a there is a systemic problem which is not noticed until a few support tasks are created, and someone recognizes these tasks are not 'one-off' but part of a pattern. Sometimes one has quite a few tasks in the pipeline before this is noticed. It would be great to have some way to merge or at least link these when this occurs, so the support team is made aware of the relationship of their task to the others, sees the overall picture better and can respond in a more coordinated way. Root cause of a complicated problem is often missed if all of the reported symptoms and the work done so far isn't brought together on one 'table'.

Thomas Woite

Same here. It is something is used a lot before I made my switch to wrike. For me this not only comes in handy in the support area with multiple tickets but especially when we organize wrike to apply gtd. For the first step is collecting and organizing is a second one, you might end up with tasks belonging to the same topic. So it would be great to be able to merge or append them. Combined with the ability the convert later complex multi-step tasks into projects (as discussed here /hc/en-us/community/posts/115000310005-Convert-a-Task-into-a-Project ) this would really be a great addition. I love the ability of wrike to have take in multiple folders/projects so I can organize my workload in my own folder structure which is where I am using the gtd methology for.

Richard Lambert

We would also like to see this functionality added to Wrike. We have several occasions where multiple people have identified the same issue while testing.

Is this something that you are looking at implementing?

John McNeilly

This is also something I would find extremely useful.

Monta May

It would also be great to merge projects. We use an external form for our clients (all the offices at our university, spread over multiple campuses and centers) to submit project requests. It's not unusual for multiple people to submit the same, or very similar requests. I'd love to be able to either merge them.

Rob 郭

sure, it's complex! i think it's desperately needed. i usually need merge tasks.

Richard Lambert

Any feedback from the Wrike team on adding the merge tasks functionality? It would be great to know if this is being worked on, in the pipe, or being ignored.

Yannis Simantiras

I am a new user of wrike, and already my team and I have come upon the need to merge duplicate tasks - pretty much for all the reasons mentioned already by others.

Permanently deleted user

Hi all, thank you for your input. This is something our Product Team is looking to discuss, however, it's not yet on any short-term roadmap. Please keep voting and commenting use cases here as it really adds value for when this is being discussed internally. Once I have any further updates I'll be sure to posts here. Thank you!

Matty Southall

This is something that would definitely be useful. What about a short-term option that simply puts the task as a subtask?

Debbie Rojonan

Really useful feature for our team as well.

lionel mitelpunkt

Please make this happen!

My ADHD self will be eternally grateful.

Ben Laycock

I would love this to be added as well!

Kathleen Wunderlich

I don't need this often, but when I do need it, I need it badly! It's hard to lose a large chunk of history by keeping one task and deleting the other - which is my current solution/sacrifice.

Arnaud Bouffard

We at ecov also have this need.
Two tasks were created (sometimes by the same people <-- can get tricky to remember all the tasks you have created...) and time entries done on both.
I want to merge the two tasks in order for the time entries of both to appear on the merged task.

Need!

Arnaud, cofounder @ecov

Roxy Vickers

Having the ability to merge would be more than just useful it is essential with growing companies, teams and projects. I do hope that this is something that is in the works and added sooner than later.

Roxy Vickers

I was impressed that there was such a quick response at my inquiry. Since I saw the last response to this was in October I wanted to reach out to Wrike to see about other options or updates.

Instead. I received what I think should probably sound helpful. But I found to be quite snarky. Guess I should just figure how to do it??

Hi Roxy!

Thank you for this feedback. I can see that you have already added your comment on a post made by Rob Irwin (/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002102985-Ability-to-merge-tasks) on our "Product Feedback" pages. So, you already know that we don't have this functionality so far. Our UX team together with PMs monitor Wrike users' comments on a regular basis and will certainly consider this proposal.
As for the Projects merge, the logic of the merge is really difficult. If you merge 2 Projects, all Tasks will show up in the same Project, part of them will be duplicating each other. And there is no way to automatically merge these Tasks. If you have a good idea how to implement it, we will be happy to hear from you.

Best regards.

Victor P
Wrike Support Team

Jon Barker

To echo all the above, especially Lionel M, my OCD alter ego needs this to be able to tidy up duplicated tasks............please introduce 'merge' asap, we have this in other project platforms we use, namely; Asana & Zen Desk. Thanks, Jon.

Helene Lanssens

Just an idea, rather than doing a full merge of fields, timelines, etc... we have the concept of a parent & child projects e.g. the parent project it the main project that is being tracked and updated, whereas the child project is just linked to the parent and would just have some minimum updates "pushed" by the parent project changes e.g. the status of the workflow will be the same as the parent and if a comment is added to the parent project, it would go in the child project too (and vice versa). For our needs it would be a good MVP.

Rob G Irwin

Regarding Victor's reply to Roxy, you say, "If you merge 2 Projects, all Tasks will show up in the same Project, part of them will be duplicating each other. And there is no way to automatically merge these Tasks. "

I wasn't asking to merge two projects, but just to be able to merge two tasks and retain the comments streams from both. Merging projects is less of an issue for me as I can move tasks between projects if necessary.

A typical use scenario for me is as follows:

I have set up an form to enter incoming job briefs. The form creates a task in a specified folder. The folder gets triaged daily and the tasks allocated to staff. Sometimes two different people fill in a form for what is effectively the same job. This creates two tasks that have information about the same job, and sometimes different but complementary information. I want to simply merge all comments, descriptions and attachments into one single task that then gets assigned.

In terms automation - don't bother. Just ask me to resolve the conflict. There's nothing wrong with a bit of manual sifting and culling of data during the merge process. Just show me a preview of the proposed merged task and let me delete any bits that I don't want.

Stephanie Westbrook

@Rob thank you for the additional information! Yes, we have the original request down as the option to merge two comments.

@Roxy I understand how the message came across and I apologize for the experience. You are correct though, Victor's intention was to provide information and not to be snarky. We're always happy to hear potential solutions from Wrike users and we were more trying to open the door for feedback. Please let me know if you have any questions!

@Helene I would love to hear a little more about this. It sounds like the child Project would be duplicating a lot of information from the parent Project. What would the child project be used for or what would be the difference between the two?

Andre Greeff

Just wanted to chime in here as well, this is a scenario that we (myself and 4 other team members) have run into a great many times. Granted, in our case, inexperience with the Wrike platform is probably the biggest contributor, but I'm no stranger to project planning systems and even I've created tasks that actually duplicated other tasks I myself created previously... Suffice to say, we (read: most of us) are only human, it will happen now and then.

With regards to the actual process of merging two tasks, I did a quick text search on this page looking for the key points that prompt people to ask for this, but I don't think enough emphasis has been put on the points of what information actually needs to be retained when they get merged.

For me, the most important aspects in this particular feature are:

Merge the "comments" stream in original date order
Be sure to sum the time logs for both tasks

Perhaps, if all entries in the activity stream for the tasks are merged (including time logs), then most of this will pretty much fall into place automatically? I would agree with Rob's comment on automation though; if there are any conflicts (or areas where it's not blatantly clear which option is "correct"), it should let the user select how the merge is done.

janet andrews

Yes, our entire team has rights to log projects and tasks, and since we all view in "My Work", we don't see that the same task is under someone else. PLEASE set up a way to merge them, while retaining comments

Valerie Carsey

Already trying to find workarounds to this not being in place. Would love to see it implemented.

Stephan Gritsch

Would love to see it implemented as well.

Vitor Verniz

Found this thread when I was looking for an answer about relocating a task to a SUB task, but merging would be important as well.

Hope sooner than later the implemantation.

Owen Jones

Yup, we need this