Role based assignments
A role lets you assign a step to a job rather than to a person. The workflow says "IT does this one", and each run decides who in IT that is.
Use a role wherever the answer to "who does this?" is a position rather than a name: when the person holding the job changes, when several people share it, or when it rotates run to run. An employee onboarding workflow assigned to the IT role keeps working when someone joins or leaves IT. The same workflow assigned to a named person needs editing every time.
Where roles live
Roles belong to a department. Two departments can each have their own Facilities role mapped to different people, and neither can see the other's.
Open Workflows, then Manage, then Roles. The page lists every department you can see with its roles underneath. There are two search boxes: one finds a role by name, the other finds the roles a given person is in, which is the one you want when you are working out what somebody actually holds.
Create or edit a role
- Click Add Role under the department, or click an existing role to edit it.
- Give it a Name. Name it after the job, not the person.
- Under People, choose who fills it. A role can hold one person or several.
- Pick an Avatar color so it is recognizable at a glance in a long workflow.
- Save.
An existing role also lists the workflows it is used in, each one a link. Check that list before you rename a role or take somebody out of it: it is the whole blast radius of the change, and a role that says "This role is not used" is safe to edit freely.
A role with several people
Mapping a role to three people does not assign a step to all three. A step is assigned to one person at a time, so the run decides which of them gets it. You pick that when the run is created, or you add all of them as participants and let them sort it out between themselves. See Assigning steps in a run.
If you genuinely need every one of them to act, that is several steps, or one step with subtasks, rather than one step assigned to a group.
The Initiator role
Every account has a role called Initiator that behaves differently from the ones you create. Its name cannot be changed and it has no list of people, because it resolves to whoever created the run. Assign the opening steps of a workflow to it and they always land on the person who started the work. See Run Initiator Role.
Using a role in a workflow
Assign the step to the role in the workflow editor, exactly as you would assign it to a person. See Assigning steps in a workflow.
Video walkthrough
This video walks through assigning steps to a role instead of to a named person.