Unable to reassign an activity using Edit function?

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi All

Just went to reassign an activity that was assigned incorrectly and it appears the reassign button is now greyed out? Image below shows the Edit window - not sure what has changed but was able to do  this earlier today? Image below shows the Assign To greyed out

Many thanks!

[Adrian Simpkins]

Just as a quick update I tested this some more, and I seem to be able to reassign activities in any requests where I am a member of the team, but I no longer seem to be able to change the activity on requests where I am not a member of the team, but previously was able to do this - has something changed please?

Many thanks

[Steve Giller]

As far as I am aware, nothing has changed in this area.

The criteria for reassignment are on the wiki page under the Re-Assignment Rules section.
Where you are not a member of the Group the Task is assigned you the criteria is that the Owner of the Task can re-assign it.

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Steve - I could definitely amend tasks earlier - however I will take a look at the wiki - thanks

[CraigP]

Hi

We're experiencing this too. I've just come back from leave to find a few emails from colleagues saying their ability to assign tasks has changed.

The assign to user within a group ("Group & User" is listed on the wiki) seems to have disappeared, so my colleagues can no longer assign tasks to themselves and still have the task visible to their team.

I have the Admin role and I used to be able to re-assign any task for any team, but now I don't even appear be able to re-assign tasks assigned to one of my teams to a different team (the team drop down is greyed out).

[Steve Giller]

30 minutes ago, CraigP said:

I have the Admin role and I used to be able to re-assign any task for any team

There is frequently some confusion in the sense of elevated expectations of the Admin role - the description of the Admin Role is:

Quote

This role provides administrative functionality to the collaboration core and should only be granted to an administrator.

There is nothing in that Role that supersedes the Security model.
The only right relating to Tasks that this Role contains is canManageTaskTemplates, which has no bearing on task assignments.

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Steve

I am still seeing some issues around this - Sam is a member of our 1st line team for testing purposes and she is unable to reassign the activity for example - I will get some more details of an example from Sam when she returns tomorrow.

As previously confirmed I was definitely able to just reassign any task / activity prior to last week with no issues using Admin as I am not a member of most teams in our instance. I tend to have at least one task reassignment request most days (staff ill, staff on holiday etc), so would have come across this issue before now. The majority of our tasks do not have an owner specified in the BPM task node which is why most users come to me to reassign any tasks incorrectly assigned.

Many thanks

 

[CraigP]

Hi Steve

Thanks for clarifying the Admin role, but this still doesn't address the fact that there has clearly been some amendment to task assignment.

As per my post above, the user field is no longer in group assignment, and the team assignment drop down is greyed out.

I've now toyed around with some tasks assigned to my team, and it seems if I assign the task to myself, I can then go back to team assignment and assign it to any team. I see there is a "Share with team" option for "User Assignment" (which I assume is supposed to replace the ability that we previously had to assign to a user within a team) but this doesn't appear until you assign it to yourself, save it, and then re-open the edit pane. This is so many more steps to assign to a user within a team, so is open to errors and teams losing visibility of tasks assigned to users if those users don't re-open the edit window to share it with the team.

It really seems like the task functionality is going backwards rather than being improved. It's strange enough that there is no role or system toggle to allow any user to re-assign any task, now there are additional steps just to assign it to a user within a team, or to another team.

1 hour ago, Adrian Simpkins said:

As previously confirmed I was definitely able to just reassign any task / activity prior to last week with no issues using Admin as I am not a member of most teams in our instance. I tend to have at least one task reassignment request most days (staff ill, staff on holiday etc), so would have come across this issue before now. The majority of our tasks do not have an owner specified in the BPM task node which is why most users come to me to reassign any tasks incorrectly assigned.

Much like Adrian says above, I have also been the person my colleagues come to in order to re-assign tasks assigned to the someone ill or on leave etc. Please advise what Hornbill expects their customers should do in the situation where a task is assigned to a user who is offline and unavailable to complete/re-assign it.

[Philds]

Just came across this issue too - our change manager was unable to assign a task tracking the implementation of a change. It's currently assigned to a team called 'Change Administrators' by the Business Process and it's not possible to assign the task to anyone outside of that team. The Team assignment option is greyed out as shown in the original post above, and the User assignment option doesn't suggest any people outside of the 'Change Administrators' team.

 

[HHH]

I re-saved the template to get around this

[SJEaton]

Just had another example of this.... I cannot edit the Team field...

 

[SJEaton]

On 5/22/2023 at 12:47 PM, CraigP said:

if I assign the task to myself, I can then go back to team assignment and assign it to any team.

Thanks for the tip on this @CraigP, it worked for me too but as you have said, this still doesn't address the fact that something has changed somewhere as I used to be able to assign tasks to a different team without having to do this.

Sam

[Philds]

Something else that may be related? When creating a new link within the Document Manager app, the Create button doesn't do anything (no errors or any other feedback) when specifying a review date for the document.

In this screenshot, clicking Create does nothing at all.

If I click Cancel and create the link again, but leave the Review Date blank, it does create the link.

As the Review Date creates an Activity I'm wondering if it's related?

Once the link is created its possible to set the review date from the Review tab, and that does successfully add a review date and create the Activity.

[Sam P]

I also cannot Edit Activities where I have been able to before, and also recently demonstrated to other team members how they can do the same.  Difficulty here is that the Team that this one is assigned is Closed (has no assigned users but not yet deleted) and even if I add myself I cant reassign it:

[Jack Stanton]

Also having this issue, 

Previously ICT teams have been able to reassign activities to different ICT teams to manage the progress on calls. This issue was recently pointed out by one of our mobile comms teams when they couldn't reassign an activity to a different team (i.e.: mobile north to mobile south.)

[Berto2002]

I do not have the same issue:

My understanding is that there is a Platform Application Right called "Advanced Task Completer" and "System Right called "Update Tasks" that you need to have in order to be able to re-assign Tasks but this also gives you the right to complete tasks assigned to other teams. We only allow a select number of Admins to have this (ITSM managers who can then ask why the Task reassignment is required). We didn't want any Task reassignment because it meant teams could bypass processes where only certain people or teams or roles should be allowed to execute a task.

We spent a bunch of time migrating BPMs from assigning tasks to "Teams" to assigning them to "Roles" and having people in multiple teams in the right Role for that Task so they did not need to re-assign. For example, we used to have a triage task on a request assigned to the triage team but when they assigned the request to 1st line support, 1st line couldn't complete the task! So we put all application support people in a Role called "Application Support" (inventive right!) and altered the BPM to assign the Task to the Role so we no longer have that issue.

[CraigP]

@Berto2002 - just to confirm, in your screenshot, I'm assuming "Service Request Assignee" is a role, not a team? As far as I can tell if the task is currently assigned to a team then the team drop down (the one on the right) is always greyed out now (even if you are in said team). It is strange that tasks assigned to roles seem to behave differently from tasks assigned to teams when it comes to re-assigning.

I tried adding myself to "Advanced Task Completer" SM role and a custom role I created with Update Tasks like you have there. However this still doesn't let me re-assign tasks assigned to other teams. However, I seem to be able to re-assign tasks assigned to roles I'm not in.

I'm glad you've found something that works for you but one hopes Hornbill aren't expecting all their customers to have to update all their BPMs to use roles rather than teams.

This is going on almost 3 months, why has there been no update?

[Steve Giller]

38 minutes ago, CraigP said:

This is going on almost 3 months, why has there been no update?

I'm not sure what update is expected here.

The previous behaviour was a bug, which was fixed.
It happens that some Users were relying on that bug, however that does not mean the bug will be re-introduced.
The behaviour of Task Re-assignment is under review, however there are no updates or timescales to offer.

[Adrian Simpkins]

Thanks for confirming Steve - I didn't pick up from previous comments that this was a bug that allowed us to do anything to a task / activity. In view of this we will look to review our BPM's with tasks / activities set and look to set a task owner / role based allocations for use going forward. 

Many thanks as always

[CraigP]

1 hour ago, Steve Giller said:

I'm not sure what update is expected here.

The previous behaviour was a bug, which was fixed.
It happens that some Users were relying on that bug, however that does not mean the bug will be re-introduced.
The behaviour of Task Re-assignment is under review, however there are no updates or timescales to offer.

It wasn't just a bug fix though was it? The assignment UI was changed, and as such it is now even less intuitive than it was before. It is not obvious at all what someone needs to do to re-assign a call to a different team (it literally just looks like it is locked out because the drop down is greyed out), and even if someone manages to assign the task to themselves, then they're expected to know that they need to re-open the task and then assign it back to their team, otherwise the rest of the team loses sight of it in their task view.

[Steve Giller]

15 minutes ago, CraigP said:

The assignment UI was changed

No, the dropdown should always have been greyed out - it was not previously because of the bug.

[CraigP]

From what I understand the bug was that if you had certain access rights you could re-assign anything you wanted, regardless of your team, and this was not intended. I can understand wanting to lock that up if not intentional (but obviously there should be a role/system setting that allows this because there will be situations where tasks need to be re-assigned where the assignees aren't available to do so - I still haven't had a response to my question about how Hornbill intend for their customers to handle this situation).

But now it sounds like you're implying that people should not even be able to re-assign their own team's tasks to another team at all? What would the purpose of that even be, considering you can re-assign tasks assigned to you individually, and tasks assigned to a role you're in.

[Estie]

Hello @Steve Giller,

Is there any update on this or the review of task assignment?