Support Multiple Assignees for Parent Tasks

[dschipfel]

Current situation

A task can currently only be assigned to a single assignee. While this works well for simple tasks, many real-world activities involve multiple people working together on the same task.

Examples include:

• Infrastructure changes involving multiple IT teams
• Hardware rollouts
• Project-related activities
• System migrations
• Cross-department coordination
• Maintenance activities requiring different specialists

I am aware that FreeITSM already supports assigning tasks to teams. However, even within a team, a task may only be relevant to specific members rather than the entire team. Assigning the task to the whole team can sometimes result in unnecessary notifications or reduced clarity about who is actually involved.

Suggested improvement

Allow a parent task to be assigned to multiple individual users.

Possible implementation options:

• Multiple assignees on a single task
• Primary assignee + additional assignees
• Notifications sent to all assigned users
• Visibility of all assigned users directly within the task
• Individual completion status per assignee (optional)

Benefits

• Better collaboration between team members
• Reduced need to create duplicate tasks
• Improved visibility of responsibilities
• More realistic representation of shared work
• Better support for projects and complex activities
• More flexibility than assigning tasks to an entire team

Many tasks are not owned by a single person and often require collaboration between a small group of specialists. Allowing multiple assignees would provide greater flexibility and better reflect how work is organized in many organizations.

[edmozley]

Hi Daniel,

This is built and pushed. Thank you for the patience - and for the question you left at the end, which turned out to shape half of it.

What it does

A task still has one owner, who is accountable for it. Anyone else working on it is listed as Involved. The task then appears in their My Tasks as well, marked, so they can still tell at a glance what is theirs to answer for and what they are helping with. Their initials sit beside the owner's on the board card, and pointing the analyst filter at somebody else asks the same question about them.

Adding somebody needs no special permission. It is everyday work, like tagging a task.

Why owner plus others, rather than a set of equal assignees

This was the one thing I did not build the way it was asked for, so it is worth being straight about. A flat set of assignees means nobody is accountable, and in practice that reads as "somebody will pick it up". Keeping one owner also meant the existing assignee field kept its exact meaning, so every stored workflow, the REST API contract and the board's grouping carried on working unchanged rather than needing to be checked one by one.

Your open question, which was the good one

You asked whether somebody added to a task hears about everything on it, or only about being added. The answer is everything, and each part is switchable on its own under Preferences -> Notifications:

• a task is assigned to you
• you are added to a task
• you are taken off a task
• somebody comments on a task you are on
• somebody changes its status
• somebody changes its due date
• a task you are on is completed

Comments and status changes are on to begin with, because somebody else moving a task is news you cannot get any other way. Due dates start off, since they get moved during planning far more often than the rest and usually several at a time.

Two rules underneath that are worth knowing. Nothing ever notifies you about your own actions, so a task you are working alone stays completely quiet. And events about the task go to everyone on it, while events about one person's own place on it - being assigned it, being added to it - go to that person alone. Sending "a task was assigned to me" to four other people would be both noisy and untrue.

The three new moments are workflow triggers as well, so you can drive automations off a task comment or a status move, not only notifications.

Optional per-person completion

Under Tasks -> Settings -> Involved you can give each person a tick of their own, so you can see who has finished. It is off by default. The ticks are progress and never a gate: the owner still closes the task, with a warning you can dismiss if people are outstanding. Otherwise one person leaving would make a task permanently uncloseable, and everybody on it would effectively hold a veto, which is co-ownership again.

Deliberately not in this version

• Subtasks. A subtask already takes an assignee of its own, which is how you say "these four are each doing a piece". Having both would be two overlapping ways to express the same thing with no rule for which wins.
• Required versus optional people, and anything portal-facing.

For the API

assigned_analyst still returns one person. A collaborators list arrives beside it, with two new filters: involved_analyst_id (owner or involved, which is what My Tasks means) and collaborator_id. unassigned=true still means nobody is accountable, even when people are helping, because that is what the filter is for.

Existing installs need a Database Verification run to pick up the new table.

Thanks again for the suggestion, and for pushing on the notifications question.

Ed