About working with roles

This article is about learning how to use people roles for tasks. This feature requires that your organization is on the Enterprise plan.

Why use roles?
The simple answer is you can pre-assign roles to tasks across a project (or across recipe tasks that will then be used for a project) so that when you add team members to a project and assign them to a specific role already assigned to tasks, that team member will automatically be assigned to all of the tasks that have that role. For example, if you have a dozen tasks in the project with the role "Business Analyst" assigned to them and then you assign Paul to that role in the project configuration page (or via a task role assignment setup), Paul's name will automatically be assigned to those dozen tasks. If you remove Paul from "Business Analyst" role, then he would be auto removed from all of those tasks. This is different than explicitly assigning a user like Paul directly to a task, not using a role as the method.

Roles & tasks:
A role (one ore more) can be assigned to a task or a new one created on a task or deleted from a task.
- A project team member can assign, create, or delete a role to the task they are assigned to, but not other tasks.
- A project (or recipe) admin or workspace admin person can assign, create, or delete roles on any project (or recipe) task

Roles & project configuration (and role assignments):
When a role is added to the task, it automatically shows up in the project's (or recipe's) configuration people/roles tab. On the project side (not recipe) the project admin can then assign people to roles (or remove them form the roles). Roles cannot be created at the project (or recipe) configuration page. They can only be created at the task level.

Roles & workspaces and sharing across the workspace:
Whenever a new role is created on a task, it not only shows up at the project config page, but also the project's (or recipe's) workspace Roles tab view. That role now can be seen and used in the select roles list on any task role selector dropdown in any project or recipe under that same workspace. If you go to a project or recipe under a different workspace, that role will not show up in the role selector list. If you want that same role name to show up in another workspace, you would need to create it as a new role to a task in that other workspace. In summary, a role belongs to a workspace and not auto shared across workspaces or organizations. If you want to clean up roles you are no longer using so they don't keep showing up in the role selector list on tasks under that workspace, then go to the workspace people roles tab and remove it from there. When you do that, it only removes it from the list pick and will not affect anywhere that role is being used.
 

The following video will provide a good summary of the value of using roles.

Overview Video

Roles is an easy way to assign title roles in advance on specific tasks and then later assign people to the roles in the project so their names will automatically be assigned to the tasks with those roles.

Adding roles to a recipe to be used on a project:

1. Start with a recipe
2. Add roles to the recipe tasks, such assigning the role "hiring manager" to the task called "interview the job candidate"
3. Create a project using that recipe
4. That project will inherit not only the recipe tasks, but also the roles associated with those tasks
5. Then assign project team members to those predefined roles in that project
6. Magically the team members will then be automatically assigned to all of their appropriate tasks based on those roles, so in our example above, if Paul is assigned to the role "hiring manager", then Paul will automatically be assigned to the task "interview the job candidate"
7. NOTE: When you create a new role in a recipe or a project, that role is automatically added to the recipe's or project's workspace. This makes it easy for other projects and recipes under the same workspace to re-use roles. Roles are not shared across different workspaces. (See "Edit roles at workspace level" article link below.)

Related Articles

• Recipe tasks roles — task level — Learn how to add roles to tasks in a recipe.
• Recipe task roles — recipe level — Learn how to manage roles at the recipe level.
• Project task roles — task level — Learn how to add roles to tasks in a project.
• Project task roles — project level — Learn how to manage roles at the project level.
• How to auto assign person to all tasks using roles — Learn how to assign people with roles.
• Edit roles at workspace level — Learn how to manage roles at the workspace level.