When trying to plan a project, you might not know even how many people you need, much less what their email addresses are.
I would normally use a placeholder, like “UI-Dev” or “Backend Dev” to assign tasks and then see if it’s doable with one person or multiple, etc.
Is there another way to do this since you can only assign tasks to signed up users?
I’ve come across similar issues where a project board does not need to be shared with external vendors, or an external vendor does not need to be part of our account as a user, but we want to specify they are responsible for a particular task. Another is that we have some project board templates where we would like to specify which team usually handles a task as a placeholder, and when that template is used in a project, eventually the actual resource would be assigned.
The only option I’ve come up with so far is to also include a dropdown column on the board and use that in addition to the Person column, where you can add those placeholder names as labels. In your case you could then delete that placeholder dropdown column when it was time to add specific people to the People column.
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I was coming here to say the exact same thing.
We have a board called “breakdown templates” that store various different project “breakdown” templates where we indicate the role responsible for each tasks. Now we use API to fully automate the creation of these projects.
Looks like this:
Task = Task name
Est Timeline = generally how long its expected to take
Role = who would be responsible
Project type = what types of projects use this specific task (used in our API)
The role dropdown makes it really easy to filter and bulk assign people to their set of tasks, and the timeline makes project planning easier all-in-all. We’re constantly tweaking our template items as we learn from our completed projects.
An alternate option would be to create “dummy” teams which you can now be used in the people column, so you could have teams named after specific roles to store in your templates.
Below is an example of how our sales team does this by creating fake people for demos.
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