Assign User Groups

I was very disappointed to see that you cannot assign a User Group to a task. I understand Wrike's idea that each task should have a single assignee (What we used to call an ONTG - one neck to grab) but it is also very common to have multiple people assigned to a task with one person responsible. We wanted to use User Groups this way so we did not have to go through the hassle of adding each individual you wanted to assign one at a time, which by the way Wrike allows and is exactly the same as allowing a User Group to be assigned, just much more time consuming. So if you can do it one by one it only makes sense to support doing it as a group

So I would like a feature enhancement to allow User Groups to be assigned to a task.

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Status: On hold

Comments

Sam Blackham

I would also really like this feature. As a Project Manager, I am not best placed to assign tasks to individuals within another team as I do not know individuals skillset or other workload (e.g. other operational day-to-day work they may have to do, outside of the Project work they have) so, therefore, would be nice to allocate it to a whole team to be distributed as they see fit.

Permanently deleted user

@David, thank you for sharing this suggestion! You're absolutely right about the current assignment logic, and I think it's awesome that your team uses this acronym for it

You're also right about why we have it set up so that User Groups can't be assignees (work tends to get done if there's less assignees). To help facilitate good project management practices we keep the logic the way it is. That said, you sound like a PM guru and I see how being able to enable an option for this would be useful, so thank you again for sharing your use case and providing details about your processes, this is really helpful!

@Sam, thanks for your input! This is also a great use case, and one suggestion I had was to @mention the User Group (or the manager of this group), so they would get a notification and distribute the workload as needed. Would this help? Happy to hear your thoughts on this!

Sam Blackham

Thanks Anastasia. We have gone with the work-around of assigning tasks to the Manager to distribute as he sees fit for now, as you suggest. This comes with it's own challenges in that he is road based for two days a week as manages staff across multiple locations, therefore, there is the risk of task dictribution being delayed by a day or two, thus potentially delaying the project.

We've tried to automate everything as much as possible within Wrike, by using the dependancies, so that the assignees of the next task in line get the email trigger to tell them it's ready to start their task. Although again, there is the work around, we could implement, of assigning muiltiple poeple to said task, assigning 20 people one-at-a-time to a task, rather than selecting a single group of people, is not a fun job and not great use of business time, which echos David 's dilema.

Perhaps having this as an option that is switch off by default, but one that an Admin could switch on, if that's how the business chooses to work, would be a good compromise?

Permanently deleted user

@Sam, thank you for the additional info! An option to switch this on or off would definitely make sense for this use case, and it's something to keep in mind. I really appreciate all of the details you've shared!

Prayes Majmudar

The original poster stole the words right out of my mouth. Being able to assign tasks to user groups would be particularly helpful to me in regards to forms usage.

We have multiple forms setup for our staff to use. Some of the forms are assigned to multiple users. When I have turnover, it's really annoying to have to go back to the form, remove off the individual that left our company and reassign to the replacement. If I could just assign the form to a group, such as "maintenance team", then all I would have to worry about is keeping the group list updated. I wouldn't have to go back into the forms and reassign every time we have a staffing change.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Prayes, thanks for commenting here and weighing in on the request and adding your vote here! The info you've shared about Request Forms is really useful, and it's definitely an interesting use case.

Sam Keomanivong

I agree. sometimes I have 8 people on a single task. It would be nice to add them all with one click.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Sam! Thank you for adding your vote here.

Brian Ouderkirk

I understand the "Best Practice" of assigning a task to a single person, however companies that receive initial project/task requests are generally vetted by a triage group. Now that Request Forms can kick-start a Project having individuals assigned within the templates will add a layer of unnecessary and convoluted user administration. This could especially pose a problem when employees change roles, or when a department on-boarded/off-boards employees. It would be increasingly difficult to almost impossible to change assignee's in all tasks contained within our Projects Template folder. I hope that Wrike revisits User Groups and our ability to assign them to Tasks instead of just using them in Comments. We could use additional flexibility as our company changes.

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Brian, thanks for those details! It helps us understand how assigning tasks to User Groups could help a particular process. Please make sure you +1 the original post above (if you haven't already).

Timothy Brestowski

I think this would be a very useful feature for us especially with our collaborator user groups. Right now we have 13 different divisions that each have their own hierarchy, approval process, media needs, etc. and rather than tagging multiple individuals, it would be ideal to tag that entire user group. For example, we publish a quarterly magazine and we love the proofing feature in Wrike. However, as I mentioned before, we have 13 divisions and usually we have about 50 different individuals providing edits, feedback, etc. Right now it isn't feasible to tag all 50 individuals for the overall task and then individually create subtasks and assign division-based individuals to different subtasks. With this feature, we could create a custom schedule for multiple divisions and receive feedback in a more structured and streamlined manner.

I hope to see this soon. Thanks!

Randy Cress

Agreed, considered some "tasks" are used as Resource Tasks that live throughout the life of the project, assigning the entire group to a task so that all users feel they should be contributors really drives the point home. +1 for adding groups to task assignment.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Timothy and Randy! Those details are much appreciated, it's always great to hear about the use cases which drive the feedback, it helps us understand the "why" and learn about your workflows. Thanks for taking the time to post this here!

Tach Sirichai

We all have different practices and needs. I do practice assigning one assignee to one task when I manage a true tasks-base project,

But Wrike has grown its useage to more than just small team's thing-to-dos. We use it to collaborate in meetings, ideas generation, proposals discussions too. Number of people work in Write grows from single small team of 5-10, to multiple international, cross-functional teams of 35-40.

As Wrike application grows wider, the object called "task" can also means idea, topic, discussion, etc. Feature like allowing assigning a "task" to a group should be a natural progression for this type of software. It should be the user's freedom of choice - to assign a task to one or two persons if you want. Some times to a group or two if you want. Shouldn't need admins to regulate your practice.

i am glad to see Wrike-Meetings feature in the labs! I'm starting to explore the feature with my team now. It's exciting to see people using Wrike to collaborate in creative ways. Well-spent company's money, lol.

More freedom and less restrictions is better in this case.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Tach, thank you for posting here! I really appreciate your insight, and I wanted to point you to another feedback post you (and others) could be interested in, where our Product Manager is seeking info about how teams collaborate in Wrike: Real Time Collaboration In Wrike.

Anna Schild

I would like to echo what's been said. It would be very useful for our team to be able to assign an entire user group to a task. We have a few specific tasks that are always assigned to an entire user group, so it would save time to click assign 'user group 1' instead of assigning all 40 users within that group. The preferred behavior we're looking for is to be able to assign 'user group 1' and then to see all 40 users assigned to the task so that when each user is done with their portion of the task, they can unassign themselves.

Tach Sirichai

Another request on this "User Group" topic.

There should be a way to find projects/folders/tasks that are shared with a particular user group.

I had created a number user groups/subgroups. Then I hit a limit - it wouldn't let me add any more user group/supgroup. To get around this limit, I tried to delete a less-used user group first. Again, It wouldn't let me to delete an existing user group because some folders/projects were share with that group.

A tech support said they can delete it from their end but need permission from the owner. I think this should be an available feature that allows admin to delete a user group that may have share access to some folders. Id I wanted to delete a user group but it has share folder/project, Wrike should give me choices to proceed with deletion or re-share that folder/project with other user group.

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Tach, I just updated our Help Center pages to make it clear that there is a User Group limit (thank you for letting us know that the info wasn't there!). I completely understand why you're looking for the functionality to delete a group even if something is shared with them and I even though it's not what you're asking for, I do have a workaround that may help (below). Quickly, from our side, the reason we've blocked off that right is that we don't want information accidentally being lost with no one left able to access it.

I know this is a workaround, but one thing you can do is create a Collaborator (it's a free license type) and then add that Collaborator to the User Group you want to delete. When you log in as the Collaborator you'll be able to see everything that's shared with the group and then go into those items and unshare them. It's a manual process but would give you the information you need to be able to delete the group.

Nicolas Villarreal

Hello,

We've reached the user group limit as well (20 groups in our case), however, this information was not available at any point (how many groups can you have for your selected amount of licenses?) Could you please clarify what is the relation between your selected plan/user database vs allowance for group creation? I've checked in the price section, and there is no information related to this.

Best,

Nicolas

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Nicolas, you can have as many groups as you have paid users plus 1 extra group (because the My Team group is included in this number) and there's a maximum of 201 User Groups no matter how many users you have. So if you have a 10 user plan, you'll be able to have 11 groups. I hope that helps to explain a little bit. For anyone else interested, we go over this information in the Important Information section of the User Group page.

Jennifer Olvera

User groups would be a great feature. In managing a creative team, I would like to assign it to the video editors as a whole, then it would be nice if as a group they can decide which from the group will be taking on the task. In this instance, it is a preference/expertise option we allow rather than a workload as other tasks may be.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Jennifer, I completely understand your use case and it makes sense. Generally, having one person assigned provides more clarity on who needs work on a task. This is why the assignment of tasks in Wrike is based on people rather than User Groups.

For now, perhaps you could assign one person from the User Group (perhaps a leader or manager of that team/department) to the task and then @mention the group in the comments section alerting the User Group that the task is available. From there the team can reassign it to the best-suited person in the User Group.

Let me know what you think of the above workaround. And thank you for your input here 🙂

Ryan Sheppard

I just tried to create a new User Group for a new client project and was notified when clicking + Add Group of the following; "You've reached the group limit for your subscription plan."

I fail to recall that there was a limit on the number of "groups" you could create. Can someone please let me know what the limit is, and where this is referenced?

Thanks,

Ryan

Carter Davis

Hi Ryan,

I believe the total number of groups you can create is 1 more than the number of licenses you have purchased.

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/209602989-User-Groups

Tach Sirichai

@Ryan Sheppard

There is a limit for number of user groups you can have. It's the number of paid users plus 1.

See Stephanie Westbrook's post on this thread above (Nov 1, 2017 1:36pm time stamp)

/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000233605/comments/115001433225

Jess Eveland

Yes! It would be great to assign a task to a group. For an Agile work flow the User Story is assigned to the Team not an individual.

Simon Gottschlag

This would also be great in the case of resource allocation, where the whole group will do something together. Instead of assigning the task to each and every member, we just assign it to the whole group and it will show up in their workload.

Steph Lewis

Upvote from me too! This would be particularly useful for how we're using Wrike to manage meetings. Being able to assign a group to a meeting would be lovely.

Mark Ziegler

Upvote from me as well.

In my case I want to have all group member to be responsible for a task. They are 10 and I am searching for a way to assign them without picking each of the members separatly. And this is recurring for me each quarter

Malesa Sidjanski

It would be great if one could assigne a group to a task, but not as being responsible for the task, but as being obliged to collaborate with the responsible person for this task and than assigne just one person to the same task as the responsible person, the person who has to push the task forward and who is also responsible to take initiative from the beginning to the end and get the job done on schedule.