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Feature Request: Automated Task Delegation

Forms Discussions Laserfiche Cloud Feature Ideas
Updated April 11
posted on May 9, 2024 • Show version history

I know that tasks can be reassigned, either by the person they are assigned to or through the "Monitor" page, however this becomes a daunting task when someone goes on holidays, takes a leave of absence, or is no longer with the company. 

It would be great to be able to either temporarily or permanently reassign a person's tasks, both currently assigned and yet to be assigned. Ideally this would be available both to the user and at an administrative level.

The only other available options I can see are:

  • Manually reassigning tasks one by one
  • Manually adjusting each business process/workflow that assigns tasks to that person
  • Assigning every task to at least two people, so if one is away it doesn't get stuck as pending (although this puts all tasks under "unassigned")
  • Assigning tasks to a team (same issue as above)
  • Creating a timer event (although this wastes time while you wait for the task to be reassigned)

 

There should be some sort of out of office setting where you can redirect tasks as easily as you can set up an auto-reply or mail forwarding, without having to completely reroute all of your processes in order to do so. 

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replied on April 10 • Show version history

Hi Sarah,

We are currently collecting and researching this feature requests, but some points are still unclear.

 

per " Ideally this would be available both to the user and at an administrative level."

Is it sufficient for System admin to set user availability?

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View 6 previous replies
replied on April 10

The ability for a Team Manager or Team Administrator would be great as well. I would imagine that some would like to have a Process Admin be able to administer it too.

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replied on April 10

My thought was that it would be helpful for a user (non-admin) to be able to reassign any of their own future incoming tasks for a period of time, for example if they are leaving on vacation. Some sort of "Out of Office" setting, essentially. Does that help clarify at all?

If providing this level of power to individual users is frowned on, perhaps some way for the user to kick off a request for task delegation, to then be assigned to, and ultimately approved/completed by, an administrator?

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replied on April 10

Do you see it as a one setting across all processes for this user or do you think the user would be willing to spend the time to assign a backup per process/task?

 

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replied on April 10

The problem is catching all processes/teams a user can be a part of. You may have some team based processes that you want to assign to someone else on your team, but be a part of some organizational processes (people manager) that you want assigned to another manager in your organization. 

For the time being, I think we would prefer to start with:

  1. OOO user's skipped in task assignment
  2. Admins/Team Manager's can easily locate active tasks assigned to someone OOO and bulk reassign them
  3. Users see a warning when attempting to manually assign a task to someone that is OOO
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replied on April 10

It would be nice if there was an OOO page (you can name it something better) where it would list a rule for each user task the user is assigned to and group them per process. Similar to how the Forms Testing rules work.

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replied on April 10

I think the ability to assign specific tasks/processes to specific people is important, but also having the option to assign all tasks to one person or team would be helpful as well, to save on effort & time.

Alternatively, some kind of bounce back to the task initiator letting them know that person is out of office would be useful, since emails sent from Laserfiche won't bounce back using a typical Out of Office email auto reply.

I have one process in particular that dynamically assigns an invoice approval process depending on who the purchaser was/which location it was for, and it can sit idle for quite some time if I don't keep an eye on it in Monitor.

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replied on April 10

I agree with Sarah. I think it has to be a mix of options to make it usable.

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replied on April 10

For specific task/process handling of OOO would it make sense for the user to do this all themselves? The user and Laserfiche don't know who can be a part of what process. Especially if you are assigning tasks dynamically via variables/workflow/etc. 

Would it make more sense for their to be general OOO escalation paths that could be applied to any user in a task or process that is OOO

For example, I have an Invoice Approval process that routes to two approval tasks.

  1. Both approval tasks goes to specific but unique users within the Finance team via some dynamic logic.
  2. The first approval task is set to kick back to the team when the user is OOO
  3. The second approval task gets routed to a specific individual when the assigned user is OOO
    1. Fallback case of suspending the process when all else fails (i.e., everyone OOO)
    2. OR - Fallback case of assigning it to the original person even if they are OOO
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replied on April 10

To put it in perspective, my organization has almost 70 user licenses, with only two of those having administrative rights. The two admin users are already stretched thin across many departments and and other responsibilities, which is why I think it would be important for the individual user to have at least some sort of power. (While Person A is OOO, assign all incoming tasks to Person B, for instance.)

For comparison, an individual user can set their email to forward to someone else in the company in the event of their absence, or decide the wording for an auto-reply to direct them to whoever should be covering their position while they are away. Neither of these require administrative rights.

I realize this is all much easier said than done, but hopefully some sort of OOO system can be implemented.

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replied on May 9, 2024

To add to this, we need to have certain controls in place where only specific people can approve for someone else, so allowing a user to select anyone they want to reroute to would cause horrible audit issues for us. I'm not sure if this could be a process setting that could restrict that or not since it really is dependent on which process it is. I love the idea though.

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replied on May 10, 2024

I previously brought up adding something to the teams to restrict reassignment to people in their team vs any user/team.  I think this is being worked on by Laserfiche.  We have one process that we have to allow supervisors to reassign to "acting" supervisors and it has already been a problem.  

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replied on May 10, 2024

In our case, even restricting assignment to team members will not work. We need to be able to turn it off completely for a process.

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replied on May 9, 2024

I am currently working on a few ways to reimagine the task management/assignment functionality in forms. This is valuable information though, so thank you. Stay tuned for more!

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View 1 previous reply
replied on May 9, 2024

Good to know, thank you for the response!

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replied on April 3

We received another request for this. Not sure if there are any updates I missed that might be coming soon.

The situation was that tasks were consistently suspending from people moving in and out of positions and no one being able to find processes where the person was assigned in an environment with hundreds of processes. We recommend using teams but for some customers that started with versions before teams existed they have not moved over.

For now they are using the DB query.

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replied on April 3

Great question, this will be on the top of my list after empower! I don't have direct control over the self-hosted roadmap but I'll include discussions for it as we outline these features

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replied on April 3

Both On-Prem and Cloud users are looking for a solution since the systems are essentially the same, but our On-Prem customers can at least run the custom database query as a workaround.

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