Raise work for a team when you do not know whose job it is
Not every task has an obvious owner. Create it for a department, notify everyone eligible, and let the first person to accept lock it — or let several join and work it together with per-person progress.
Unlimited departments on every plan term.
The problem
Guessing a name is how work ends up assigned to the wrong person
Assigning to an individual forces a decision the person raising the task often cannot make. They do not know who is free, who is on leave, or who has done this before.
- Work is sent to whoever the manager thought of first, which is usually whoever is already busiest.
- A task assigned to someone on leave sits untouched until the due date passes.
- The alternative — posting it to a group chat — assigns it to nobody, so two people start it or none do.
- When a person changes team, their old queue does not follow them and their new team’s work does not reach them.
- Managers end up as routers: every incoming request passes through them before it reaches anyone who can do it.
How TaskIt handles it
A task with an audience instead of an assignee
A department task is created unowned. Every active member of that department is notified and may pick it up, and the system decides ownership atomically so two people cannot both win.
- Single Owner mode: the first eligible member to press Accept & Start locks the task. Everyone else sees who took it and keeps read access.
- Collaborative mode: any eligible member may join. The first to arrive becomes the owner; later joiners are collaborators, and each logs their own progress.
- Eligibility resolves live from department membership — transferring someone into Sales grants them Sales’ queue immediately, and transferring them out revokes it just as fast.
- The claim is a single conditional write, checked by affected-row count. Two people pressing Accept in the same millisecond cannot both get the task.
- Employees see their department’s unclaimed work on their dashboard and under Available to claim.
What you get
The manager stops being the router
Work goes to the team that owns the capability, and the team decides who takes it. The manager sees the outcome without having to make every allocation decision.
Nothing is silently assigned to someone on leave
An unclaimed task is visibly unclaimed. It sits in a queue everyone eligible can see rather than in one absent person’s list.
Duplicate work stops being possible
In Single Owner mode the lock is atomic, so the second person to click is told the task is taken rather than starting a parallel copy of the same job.
Shared work still has real numbers
In Collaborative mode each person logs their own progress and the task’s overall figure is the mean across active collaborators — not one person’s guess on everyone’s behalf.
How it works
In the order a person using it meets them.
- 1
Choose a department instead of a person
On the create form, set the assignment type to Department and pick which one. An Admin can assign to any department; a Manager to the departments they manage.
- 2
Pick the work mode
Single Owner for a job one person should finish. Collaborative for work several people genuinely contribute to, such as an event setup or a stock count.
- 3
Everyone eligible is notified
Every active member of that department gets the notification — in-app, and over WhatsApp if the workspace uses it. The task appears in their Available to claim list.
- 4
Someone accepts, or several join
Accepting takes the task straight to In progress — a department task skips Assigned entirely, because nobody was assigned. From there it behaves like any other task: progress, handover, review, completion.
A design department queue on a normal week
One department, two work modes, no allocation meeting.
- 1
Monday — a survey is raised
"Site survey — Andheri" goes to the design department in Single Owner mode. Four active members are notified.
- 2
Monday — claimed in eleven minutes
The member who is nearest the site accepts. The task locks to them and moves straight to In progress. The other three see it is taken.
- 3
Wednesday — a shared job
The quarterly catalogue refresh is raised Collaborative. Three designers join; each logs their own progress on their own section.
- 4
Thursday — someone is pulled away
One designer leaves the task. Their contribution row stays, they stop counting toward the mean, and the remaining two carry on without the task changing hands.
- 5
Friday — the report
Tasks by Collaborator and Collaboration Statistics show who contributed to what, and Acceptance & Completion Times shows how long the queue took to be picked up.
The result
Nobody was assigned work they could not do, and nothing sat unclaimed without being visible.
Single Owner: first to accept, locked
The default. The first eligible member to press Accept & Start becomes the assignee and the task is theirs. Everyone else sees that it has already been accepted and keeps read access, so the team still has visibility of work it is not doing.
Collaborative: several people, one task, real progress
Any eligible member may join. The first person to arrive becomes the primary owner and is mirrored onto the task’s current assignee, so handover, review and completion keep working unchanged. Everyone who joins gets their own progress figure.
- Overall progress is the rounded mean of every active collaborator’s own figure — 40% and 70% reads as 55%
- A member joining at 0% therefore lowers the reported overall progress, which is arithmetic, not a bug
- Leaving is safe: the contribution row is kept, and the longest-serving remaining collaborator is promoted if the owner leaves
- If the last collaborator leaves, the task returns to the department queue unclaimed with every contribution row preserved
Who may assign to a department
Derived from the permissions a role already holds rather than a new key. Admins with company-wide task visibility can assign to any department; Managers with the assign permission can assign to the departments they manage; Employees can accept or join tasks they are eligible for, but cannot raise department work.
Department attribution keeps reports honest
A task created without a department inherits its assignee’s department. Without that, department reports and department health figures would quietly under-count every task raised in a hurry.
| Single Owner | Collaborative | |
|---|---|---|
| Who ends up responsible | The first member to accept | The first to join, with collaborators alongside |
| What everyone else can do | Read the task | Join it at any point |
| Progress | One figure, from the owner | Per person, averaged across active collaborators |
| Leaving | Handover to another person | Leave the task; contribution row is kept |
| Typical use | A job one person should finish | Work several people genuinely share |
Frequently asked questions
One of them gets it. The claim is a single conditional update that only succeeds while the task is still unowned, and the result is checked by affected-row count rather than by reading and then writing. The second person is told the task has already been accepted.
No. It is created unowned with the status New, and goes straight to In progress when someone accepts — a department task never passes through Assigned, because nobody was assigned.
Dynamically, at the moment it is checked: a user is eligible if their department matches the task’s department, or if they manage that department. Nothing is snapshotted at creation, so moving someone between teams takes effect on their queue immediately.
No. Assigning to a department requires either company-wide task visibility or the assign permission for that department. Employees can accept and join the work they are eligible for.
Where to go next
The capabilities either side of this one, and the problems it is bought to solve.
Give one department a queue
Pick the team that gets the most "can someone look at this" requests and raise a week of them as department tasks.