Out of Office Delegation Enhancements v2: Global Change to Project Owner When I am Out to Reduce Workfront Emails

[#1]

Description - Global change to the project owner field for *all* projects from one project owner to another project owner while someone is out of the office (or when someone has permanently left the team, etc.) with the ability to switch ownership of all projects to another project owner as needed (when someone returns from vacation or when a new employee transitions into a role, for example). 

Why is this feature important to you - Right now the workaround POs are using is to copy other POs on all tickets to give them visibility into the work which means out of control emails that are not helpful or useful 95% of the time. 

How would you like the feature to work - I'd like project owners to be able to flip a switch to assign projects they own to another project owner and we'd like the ability to turn it off when we don't need to assign projects to others. Any project owner should have the ability to do this for any other PO to account for someone leaving the team. The primary use case is project owner A is unexpectedly ill or out of town on vacation and assigns their workload to project owner B (or project owner B assigns project owner A's work to themselves).

Another less common use case is project owner. A leaves the team or leaves the company and project owner B is hired and onboarded at which time all projects would be assigned to them. There might be a need to temporarily assign project owner A's work to another PO until project owner B is hired. 

Current Behaviour - The current workarounds we use include adding other POs to a project to have visibility across project owners just in case someone goes out of town.

[#2]

We had a similar situation with PTO coverage on our project management team.

Our PMs are assigned as the project owner. We created a custom field named "PM2" (typeahead user).

Then we adjusted our project/tasks report filters to show projects if the current user was the project owner OR listed in the PM2 field. As soon as the project owner returned from PTO the PM2 removes their name and thus the project/tasks from all of their reports.

We also use this when we have a second PM providing support or a video producer who needs to collaborate with the PM/project owner.

Filtered By:

pm2 ID in $$USER.ID

and Queue Is Public in 0

and Status in Current

- OR -

Owner ID in $$USER.ID

and Queue Is Public in 0

and Status Equates With in CUR

[#3]

@Ross_Barton thanks for that idea! I'm throwing it over to our Ops team to see what they think. 

[#4]

At my previous company we handled this with a couple options. 

1. all our project managers had manage access to all projects from the Project Sharing on the Project Templates, so they all had access to manage any project they needed to
2. reports that project managers regularly used to manage their projects were all on a dashboard, but there was also a "covering" dashboard that they all had access to. Each of the reports on the covering dashboard had a prompt for project owner, so if you're covering for someone you just enter their name in that prompt and their projects pull into the report.