Reassign a task to another analyst when you are not the task assignee

[Damian Roberts]

I have looked through the wiki page on Activities and can't understand how I can reassign a task to another analyst when I'm not the assignee.  An analyst is sick and has a task assigned to them.  Even as sys admin I can't reassign to another analyst.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Damian Roberts

Thanks for your post.

I have just tried editing a task while logged in as the Hornbill Admin and I was able to edit the task and reassign to another user.  Are you logged in as your regular user that has admin rights, or are you logging in as the Admin?

In order to help and make task management easier, the Owner of the task needs to be set in the BPM when the task is being created as the owner has this ability to reassign.  If not set, the owner defaults to a system user which only an Admin would have an option to edit the task.  For the owner, it is recommended to have a team leader, Service Desk Manager, or the manager of the person that owns the request set as the task owner.  Not only does this help with reassignments, but the Owner can also view and monitor all the tasks that they own, which are assigned to their staff from within the Activities View.

[CraigP]

I was just about to post about this as many colleagues have queried this during our time using Hornbill. I have admin rights so I have the ability to change assignees on tasks, but I'm told that once an individual is assigned then even if a team/group they belong to is also assigned, the other members of that team/group can't re-assign it.

I was on leave last week, and a colleague accidentally assigned a task to someone else in their team who was also on leave, so they had no way to re-assign it. This is obviously not ideal.

The solution of assigning an owner is okay, and I have done this for one of our processes for one individual to have ownership of all tasks on that process, but I feel it gets more complicated when there are multiple tasks for different teams, and I can't see a dynamic way of getting the different team managers in the BPM. The way I did it for the one process I mentioned was to put the username in one of the attribute fields on their team, then get the team details and use the attribute for the owner variable in the BPM. I guess this works but you do have to remember to manually update this attribute if the team leader changes. If there is a more elegant and dynamic way of retrieving a team manager I would like to know.

And even then you're still leaving it to a single user that may not be available to re-assign the tasks when required. Ideally there should at least be ability for everyone in the assignee's team to be able to re-assign their task if required. Is this a possible improvement?