Auto Assign Tasks to Project Team Members using Roles

Last Modified On: November 11, 2024

When creating your project plan, you can define the role that will be responsible for each project task. When you are ready to assign tasks to your resources, you can then add your resources as Project Team Members and define their roles in the project. Inspire Planner will automatically assign tasks within the project to the project team members based on their role. 

Step 1: Define a Role for Project Tasks

The first step would be to define the role that will be working on each of your Project Tasks.

Helpful Hint: We recommend defining a role for each of your project tasks within your templates so that new projects created from the template also inherit the role. 

Please Note:
There are two (2) fields in Project Task object for defining roles - Role and Multi-Role. The Role field is planned for deprecation and we no longer recommend using this field. Instead, we recommend using Multi-Role.

If you do not see "Multi-Role" in the list of available columns within the Project UI, please visit Migrating from Role to Multi-Role.

To customize the picklist values for Role, please see Admin Guide - Customize Role Picklist.

The multi-role field is a multi-select picklist which means you can select multiple roles. 

Step 2: Add Project Team Members

Once you've defined a role for your project tasks, you can then add your project team members. Project Team members are the resources who are going to be assigned to the tasks within the Project.

Click on the Team tab at the top of your project schedule.

Click on New.
 

Search for the resource (user, contact or queue). Specify the resource's Role and then click on Save. Repeat this step until you have added all of your project team members.

Please note the following:

• If there are project team members with the same role, then the project tasks will be assigned to all project team members with the same role.
   
• Salesforce users added as Project Team members are also automatically going to be added as Collaborators on the project with "Viewer" permissions. If you do not wish to add the user as a collaborator, set "Add as Collaborator" to FALSE. You can also adjust the permission level of the collaborator.
  
  When Contacts or Queues are added as Project Team members, even when "Add Collaborator" is TRUE, it does not create a collaborator record. Contacts can only be added as collaborators to the project using the "Add Collaborator" Icon within the Project Toolbar.
  
  If a collaborator record already exists for the user, it will not create a duplicate record.

When you create project team members, if the project team role and the project task role match, Inspire Planner automatically assigns the task to the resource and a related Salesforce Task is immediately created. If you wish to only assign tasks on demand or when the task is ready to be started, you can define the auto assign mode for the project. For more information, please see Auto Assign Mode.

Switching between tabs within the Project does not refresh the page. To see the values in Assigned To, you will need to manually refresh the page.

Managing Project Teams

If you need to replace a project team member, you can simply edit the existing project team record with a new user or contact. This will unassign the project tasks from the previous resource and delete the equivalent Salesforce Tasks (unless there is already time entries logged). It will then assign the Project Tasks to the new resource and create a new set of Salesforce Tasks. Please note, however, that if the task status is "Completed", then it leaves the task as is, assigned to the same resource. 

If you edit the Role within a project team record, it will unassign the tasks from the resource and delete the related Salesforce Tasks. It will then assign the resource to any project tasks that have the new role you specified and create a new set of related Salesforce Tasks.

If you delete a project team record, it will unassign the tasks within the project and delete the related Salesforce Tasks. It will also automatically delete the Collaborator record for the project team member unless they are the project owner.

If you change the value in Multi-Role field for a project task, it does not unassign the previous resource.