Hi Everyone, Mark from Green Llamas here with another fun workflow hack for a common use case.
This is something that we have had asked of us on numerous occasions and would like to share how we get it done. The ask: “When an event happens on a board, I want a new group created on a different board with the name of the Item that triggered the event” That was a mouthfull…
The Issue
Creating the new group via automation is no probllama. The naming of the group dynamically when initiated from a different board is where we have roadblock.
The Workaround
So how do we make this work. For this example lets have two boards: Project Pipeline and Campaign Status. Each time our Project is marked as “Live” (via Status change), we want to create a new Group in the Campaign Status board with the Name of the Project.
First the easy part, in the Project Pipeline board we add the following custom automation, this actually adds an Item to the board, not a group (more on that later):
On the Campaign status board, we created a group at the bottom of the board called “Automation Trigger”, while this isn’t mandatory, it keeps items from temporarily popping up in groups that are used in production. We also map the name of the item, to the name of the new item.
On the Campaign Status board we created two new columns that will be hidden by default: “(create group)” with options of Create and default, and a second column called “(delete item)” with options of Delete and default. These columns will help us manage when new items are created and to delete the trigger item once the process is complete. So as part of the mapping we also set the (create group) column to “Create”:
Now the fun part.
On the Campaign Status board, we have a set of simple automations:
This triggers the creation of a new group from a Status change. So that item we sent over from the Project board, it will trigger the above automation. This also ensures that when an item is created manually or by other automations it will not trigger the process. The new group name is mapped to the Item name.
We use a similar automation to set our (delete item) column to “Delete”. This will ensure that the delete step happens after the group creation occurs.
And finally, we trigger the deletion of the item.
Ta Daaa!! We are left with our newly minted group with the name sent from our Project Board with no trail left behind from the item that was sent to initiate it!
Hopefully some folks out there find this useful in thier monday journeys!
As always, feel free to reach out to us anytime and check us out online to learn more about what we do!
Mark
