Give each team a queue it actually owns
Work routed to a department instead of a person gets picked up by whoever is free, not by whoever the requester happened to think of. Eligibility resolves live from team membership, so transfers take effect immediately.
Unlimited departments on every plan term.
The problems this page is about
If none of these describe your week, a different page on this site probably does.
How it goes today
The manager is the routing table
Every incoming request passes through one person who decides who it goes to. That person becomes the bottleneck, and their leave becomes the department’s outage.
Work crosses a boundary and stops
Accounts needs something from Operations. It is raised as a message to a person, that person is away, and nobody in Operations knows it exists.
Two people do the same job
A request posted to a team channel is claimed by whoever answers, twice, because there is nothing that can be claimed exclusively.
Department performance is a guess
You can see individuals and you can see the company. The layer where capacity decisions are actually made has no numbers of its own.
With TaskIt
Raise work for the team, not for a name
A department task is created unowned. Every active member is notified and may claim it, so the person raising it does not have to know who is free, on leave or already overloaded.
Two work modes for two kinds of job
Single Owner locks the task to the first member who accepts — everyone else keeps read access. Collaborative lets several join, each logging their own progress, which is averaged into the task’s overall figure.
Eligibility follows the org chart, live
A person is eligible if their department matches the task’s, or if they manage that department. Nothing is snapshotted at creation, so moving someone into Sales grants them Sales’ queue immediately and moving them out revokes it.
Claiming is exclusive by construction
The accept is a single conditional write checked by affected-row count. Two members pressing Accept in the same millisecond cannot both win, so duplicate work is not merely unlikely — it is impossible.
Attribution that keeps reports honest
A task created without a department inherits its assignee’s department, so department reports and department health figures do not quietly under-count everything raised in a hurry.
Three departments, one week
A services business with Operations, Accounts and Field teams.
- 1
Requests stop being addressed to people
Anything Accounts needs from Operations is raised for the Operations department. The requester never has to know who is in today.
- 2
The queue is visible to the team
Every eligible member sees unclaimed work on their dashboard and under Available to claim. Pickup becomes a team behaviour rather than a manager instruction.
- 3
Shared jobs are shared properly
The monthly stock count is raised Collaborative. Three people join, each logs their own progress, and the overall figure is the mean of the active contributors.
- 4
A transfer mid-week
A technician moves from Field to Operations. Their Field queue disappears and the Operations queue appears the moment the change is saved.
- 5
Friday
Department Performance, Workload and Acceptance & Completion Times give each department its own numbers rather than a share of the company’s.
The result
The manager spent the week on the two exceptions instead of on forty routing decisions.
The result
No percentages, because nothing here has measured yours — these are the changes the mechanism produces.
Faster pickup, without pressure
Acceptance time is the gap between raising work and someone taking it on. A visible queue with several eligible people is the most direct way to shorten it.
Absence stops being an outage
Work addressed to a team does not sit in one absent person’s list. There is always more than one person who can pick it up.
Capacity conversations have evidence
Department-level workload and completion figures make a request for another pair of hands a numbers conversation rather than an impression.
Cross-department work stops disappearing
When the boundary is a queue rather than a message, work does not fall into the gap between two teams.
Frequently asked questions
An administrator with company-wide task visibility can assign to any department; a manager with the assign permission can assign to the departments they manage. Employees can accept or join the work they are eligible for, but cannot raise department tasks.
It stays visibly unclaimed in the department queue and on every eligible member’s dashboard, rather than sitting in one person’s list where nobody would see it. A manager can assign it directly if it needs to move.
Not by claiming from the queue — eligibility is department membership, or managing that department. A manager can hand the task over to a specific person outside the department, which records the transfer as a handover.
Each active collaborator logs their own progress and the task’s overall figure is the rounded mean across them. A member joining at 0% therefore lowers the reported overall figure, which is arithmetic rather than a fault.
Where to go next
The capabilities behind this page, and the neighbouring situations they also cover.
Give one department a queue
Pick the team that fields the most ad-hoc requests and raise a week of them as department tasks instead.