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Assign people to workflow steps
complete
meghscase
For us, it would be much more helpful to assign people to steps in the workflow rather than content items. Pretty please!
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James Peacock
complete
Hi everyone. I'm happy to share you can now assign people to workflow!
This feature is available on Scale & Transform plans, and is accessible via the workflow dropdown in the content editor.
You can view the help article here to get started: https://help.gathercontent.com/en/articles/5391254-assigning-people-to-workflow
Thanks for all of your input on this feature, and I hope you find it useful.
James Peacock
Hi everyone, I hope you're well. After a short break of welcoming a new human to the world it's good be back, swapping nappies for design. Though working from home it's really now a mixture of the two!
A quick update to share on this. We'll be releasing workflow assignments in two steps. First we'll release our refined workflow dropdown in the content editor. We're aiming to start rolling that out this week - we're just cleaning up the final bits. It's a far more elegant, simplified way of progressing content and I can't wait for you to see it.
Straight off the back of this, we'll be implementing the final solution of assigning people to workflow. The bulk of the work has already been completed so you won't be waiting long for that to go live. Workflow assignments will be available on plans with access to advanced workflow (Scale & Transform - legacy plans may differ so reach out to our support team if you're unsure).
Thanks for your patience and I'll update you if there's anything new to share.
James
James Peacock
in progress
Hi everyone. Just a quick update to share with you that we're now actively working on this. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback, we're confident that the changes we're working on will be a big improvement.
Changing anything in the app, even when it's an obvious benefit, can cause some anxiety for existing users who are used to working in a certain way. We don't take changing core parts of our app lightly, no matter how small the change.
With that in mind I have put together a help article explaining what will be changing and why, from the workflow dropdown itself to assigning people. We will be informing everyone of the upcoming changes before release.
You can view the help article here:
As always the team is on-hand to answer any questions. Thanks again for everyone's involvement in helping shape this update.
James
James Peacock
Hi everyone. A huge thank you to those of you who have responded to our questionnaire. We've already gathered some great insight, not just confirming some of our thinking, but also forcing us to think differently in certain areas which is what we want.
I have made some changes to the design you saw in the questionnaire and have recorded a 3 minute walkthrough for you to watch:
It'd be great to get some feedback on the changes! As for the results of the questionnaire itself, there are some clear themes:
Workflow assignees should be at an item level rather than a project level, as different items will require default people.
Changing the status without a blue confirmation button different feel "concrete" to some of you. Hopefully the design changes help improve that.
It's almost a 50/50 split between considering an item as complete when it's on the last status, and marking the last status as complete. We'll look into this some more.
Again thank you for your input on this!
James
Justin Kramp
James Peacock: The explanation of choosing a status instead of marking as complete makes sense when we consider steps are not always linear and items may move through steps in different orders. The ability to add a comment when updating a status looks great too.
While our team was looking at this, some people commented that seeing the duration for each status (both since last moved to this status and cumulative) as well as for each assignee would help identify bottlenecks in process or resources.
James Peacock
Justin Kramp: yes, having the ability to view the health metrics of items would be hugely beneficial. There's a whole theme of work around this we want to tackle in the future, including task management and scheduling, but being able to see the duration spent on a workflow status may be a good place to start. Thanks for the feedback.
James Peacock
planned
Hi Everyone. I'm happy to share that next on the roadmap we will be working on improving workflow, and as part of that, we'll be introducing the ability to assign people to workflow steps.
During this early stage, I have created a short questionnaire for you to answer:
If you can find the time it will really help us release the best possible experience we can for you.
I'll share further updates when I can. In the meantime, thanks for your help!
James
S
Sara Distin
Ditto, being able to assign people to workflow steps would alleviate a huge pain point in our process.
Angus Edwardson
Angus Edwardson
Merged in a post:
Assign users to workflow statuses.
Chris Charlick
Have a user, or multiple users automatically assigned to a workflow status, and de-assigned when the item progresses (unless assigned to the next status).
This comes up regularly, and the concept of assigning people to items as a whole is often confusing to users.
Important reason: Assigning users to items should be a more valuable feature. It's often not taken advantage of because of the manual effort to do it & the burden to assign at different stages lays with users rather than champions.
Mark Monahan
Agreed. Some staff never create content, they only proof and publish.
Jessica Power
Yes, we also would have much greater use for GC if we could assign users to certain steps - and also to lock down certain steps to users (e.g. publishers, when an item is published, they should be the only ones able to update this status)
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