Bulk Assignments - No Users to assign?

[dawnmaried10]

My team is having an issue with bulk assignments. We always used "Scheduling" to assign tasks to roles but that no longer works so we are using Workload Balancer. When they try to "Assign user" after they select the "Task role assignment" there are no Users to assign? The only option is "Assign me". In the past, all people with that role would come up.

Is this just not fully baked? Am I missing something? Could be me just missing an important piece to this puzzle? I have looked everywhere and cannot figure out what is wrong.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

[_Manish_Singh]

I see the same behaviour in our instance.

[dawnmaried10]

Thank you for your response. I really thought it was just me. I will open a support ticket, anything I learn I will share.

[Charleigh_Loder]

Manish, I discovered and reported this as a bug as well and was informed it is currently functioning as designed and an Idea needed to be submitted for Upvotes for it to be changed. Please Upvote this idea here.

[RandyRoberts]

This is malfunctioning in the regular task assignments area as well. I was told it is working as (poorly) designed. The real problem is that it is not working as it originally used to work.

Here is my support ticket:

I have a task with a role in the assigments field. When I select that field, it should display a list of users with that role. It does not. it only displays me, no matter what role is in the field.

I have 2 tests, one where Assignment=Creative - Presentation Design ans one where Assignment=Operations. I have 11 people with the role "Ceative - Presentation Design" and 6 in "Operations" yet it only displays me in both suggestions.

Engineer Reply:

"If a team is already assigned, it should bring suggestions from the assigned team members only in the case where those team members have been assigned in the last 30 days by the user who is making the assignment.

You can test it by assigning one of the team members, save it, and then go to another task, assign the same team and see if that team member is already available in the recommendations list or not."

My Reply:

I think we both know this is not how it has always worked before.

Check out 1:40 in this Workfront training video:

https://one.workfront.com/s/managed-content-videos/assign-tasks-from-the-project-plan-MCWPJNKVD3XZH5...

After a few more back and forths, My reply:

So, I wonder when they changed that? It's useless now. We use it because we have 1,000 users and people use it to suggest assignees whom they don't know. If they've already assigned them recently, they don't need the suggestion. This is just one more thing I'll have to tell people that doesn't work anymore.

According to an old training video Workfront made, it shows it working as I was originally taught. Only users with the same job role are showing. Now you may say the trainer had assigned those users before, highly unlikely since it's a training video. The other difference is It doesn't even show the logged in user, so we know it has in fact changed. I nicked the video and saved it so I could reference it and luckily I had it in backup. See the screenshot.

I can't believe I have to save and reference old training videos to prove something isn't working.

That last reply was June 21st.

Since then… crickets.

[dawnmaried10]

Thank you!! This is very insightful. I appreciate you sharing the back and forth. Although, I don't use it all the time I did/do share how it should be used so I feel your pain when something doesn't work as advertised. I submitted a ticket with essentially what I put above. Currently, they are looking into it. I will share what I learn. I hope it's a resolution and not crickets. 😉

[dawnmaried10]

Good morning,

I heard back and got the same answer. It's unfortunate that each user that makes assignments will need to do this for each role that has yet been assigned to build the Smart Assignment list. Additionally as you mentioned if you have 11 people with the role "Creative - Presentation Design" the user has to use all 11 before they will appear when you make the assignments.

I've built a role template that has all the users for each role assigned to a task (I named the task the role name). This way a Project Manager can create a project using the "role" template to capture the users related to that role. After they've created a project with this template the users related to the roles will appear when they go to assign based on role in a live project.

As people come and go I will need to update the template but at least it's a start. Additionally, I will make a role template for each "group" since not everyone uses the same roles for their projects.

If I can I will make the "Role" project from the template for each project manager so they can use the Bulk Assignment as before.

Thank you again for sharing your experience.

Dawnmarie

See below the response from Workfront support.

_________________

Since you've only recently switched to our Workload Balancer there may not have been enough assignments done through this tool for the Smart Assignments to work as expected. If you take a look at our documentation on assigning work in bulk through the Workload Balancer, it states:

• In the User to assign field, click the drop-down arrow to choose from a list of suggested users or to type another user name. Users listed in the list by default match the criteria for Smart Assignments. For more information, see Smart assignments overview.

If you view the Smart Assignments criteria in the smart assignments overview, it states:

• Users assigned to other work items in the past 30 days by the user making the assignment. The first 50 users that match this criteria display. The user that is most often assigned displays first.

What I believe is happening, is there hasn't been assignments made by yourself to meet the Smart Assignments criteria. If this seems wrong let me know. We could test this by assigning a user to TEST Mary Poppins that we know is a fit for the roles on the Project and see if the user populates after a first assignment has been made recently. Let me know if you have any questions.

[RandyRoberts]

That's kinda what I got back too but they fail to mention that it used to work correctly. At some point his changed. If you view the old Ascent videos, you'll see it used to work like we're expecting it to work.

I think they're just gaslighting us.

[CalvinFold]

Seems that way. This kind of behavior has become more common under Adobe. "We made a change to expected behavior, suck it up or put in an Idea to fix it (change it back)." To me, this is a bug, plain and simple: add functionality, never take it away.

(Kinda surprised my users haven't complained about this yet…just seems an asinine change…)

[Sheri_Whitten]

Also missing is the "Add Users" button and I use that often. Luckily, Scheduling is still working for us inside a project, so I won't switch to the WB until we're forced to.

[Charleigh_Loder]

I discovered and reported this as a bug as well and was informed it is currently functioning as designed and an Idea needed to be submitted for Upvotes for it to be changed. Please Upvote this idea here.

Below is my bug report, the reply from tech support and my response which captures why I strongly  feel this needs to be addressed before the Scheduler tool is depreciated.

Case #00334706
Workload Balancer Bulk Assignments not listing users associated with Task Role
In the Project level Workload balancer tool for Bulk Assigning tasks, the Assign User action is no longer populating the User list to assign based on the Task Role assignment selected. Confirmed the bug is present even in a new incognito window. Screenshots attached showing current issue and correct function in scheduling assignments tool.

TECH SUPPORT:
After reviewing our documentation here, the user list is not specifically designed to pre-populate with users who fit the role assignment. Instead, it follows the criteria for smart assignments, as listed below:
See full article: Smart Assignments Overview

In other words, if no users are populating when attempting to bulk assign a specific task role, it likely means that the logged-in user has not assigned anyone with that role in the past 30 days. 

One way you can test this is to manually assign a user with that specific role to any task, and then go back to the bulk-assign tool. You should now see that the user pre-populates in the list as expected. 

MY RESPONSE:
That is both a surprise and disappointment since the expectation and assurance was the tools were being consolidated without losing functionality. It seems small, but the original function to display the users associated to the roles is key to why the roles are assigned in Workflow templates in the first place. Only displaying recent assignments does not help owners see  when the list of workers associated with roles changes (like when new users are added or when users change roles). It also no longer provides the crucial support to new owners who will not have assigned anyone at first or know the team well enough to just know what users associate to what role. So, this change takes away a big part of what made that tool so valuable.