Status Change Assigns Person Only If Person is Not Assigned

We have a board which we use as a checklist for tasks that repeat infrequently, like our very particular onboarding and offboarding processes. We create boards from a template that has no person assigned to tasks that need to be completed by the supervisor. The template has a person assigned to tasks that other departments will need to do, and another status column that notifies each assigned person when their task becomes “Ready to go” based on dependencies with other tasks marked done. A final status column names our departments, and when this status is changed to a particular department an automation assigns the supervisor of that department to the Person column, filling the blank person column from the template after the board is created.

What I need it to do next is assign the supervisor as person ONLY IF no person is assigned, that is, Person is unassigned/empty. This way it won’t double up reminder notifications and it won’t replace the person assigned for those that always do particular tasks in the checklist. I don’t seem to be able to do this with the “only if” automation, it requires me to choose someone and I don’t see an option for “Person is unassigned”. Anyone know a workaround?

Hey @bmaggetti,

At this time I am afraid we do not have a recipe that supports what you’re trying to achieve - specifically is person is not assigned. This is a great suggestion however, and we encourage you to post this request through our submit idea section. That being said, in order to workaround this limitation, would you be willing to set up an additional status column that aligns with whether or not a person is assigned? That way, you could set up something like this:

To streamline this a bit more, you could set up a recipe to change the status column to person assigned when someone is assigned in the person column, so you have greater visibility as to which item has been assigned and which hasn’t?

I of-course recognise this isn’t the most efficient option, but I wonder if it would work in some way?

Thank you Bianca, this is exactly the workaround I used. This feature would be great so I hope it can get added.

1 Like

Hi Brad, Did you submit this as a feature request? It is still not an option.