Members vs assigning

rax adaam

I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage cards that involve multiple team members, but only need to be handled by one team member at a time. 

e.g. my team is using a standard "back-logged / to-do / in-progress / blocked / completed" list set up. Many of the tasks only involve one team member, in which case they are the only member added to the card associated with that task: this makes it very clear who is responsible for that task, as well as what tasks different group members are working on. 

However, more complicated tasks may involve all group members of a team. For example, UX feedback cards are created by our programmer and added to the "to-do" list. However, the programmer would like to be notified of updates to the card, so he can start tackling issues as soon as the first points are added, so he adds himself as a member to the card. Of course, he also adds our UX designer, as well as another member of our team who acts as a "tie-breaker / 3rd party" when the two of them either disagree or aren't 100% certain about a given call. 

As such, there are three members on the card, making it unclear who is currently responsible for the card. Moreover, when the UX designer moves the card from "to-do" to "in-progress," once he is done, the card ends up going *back* to the "to-do" list (because it now has a checklist of feedback items for the programmer to work on), but, again, nothing makes the change-of-hands clear. 

I realize we could work the assignment into the title and duplicate the card upon completion (e.g. it starts as "UI Feedback - <Designer's Name>" and once the designer is done, he moves it to "completed" then duplicates the card & changes the title to "UI Feedback - <Programer's Name>"), but this feels a little messy, & I worry about teams getting lost between the versions of the cards ("where was that comment? was it on the designer version or on the programer version?" etc). To avoid this, we could, instead, simply update the card title; however, because markdown isn't supported in titles, I feel like the change to the title will not stand out enough to be really noticeable. 

The only other solution I could think of was using labels, but somehow this didn't seem like the best use of labels (we've just migrated from another PM system, so are still trying to figure out the optimal use of different options, in Trello), but I'm not sure what else we'd use them for & am starting to think that might be the best option. 

Is it possible to assign a card to a particular member? i.e. is there some built-in functionality for this? If not, I'd be really interested to hear from other users as to which approach has been the most successful for their teams (I'm also thinking in terms of tracking work completed by different members).

rax adaam

After trying a few different possibilities, here's what my team has come up with:

When Team Member A creates a card for which s/he is responsible, but which Team Member B should be aware of, as it progresses, Team Member A assigns themself to the card adds a comment "@TeamMemberB watch" which turns on Team Member B's watch status for that card. 

Once Team Member A is done with the card, they can turn on their own "watch" status, remove themself from the card, and assign it to Team Member B.

N.B. because it does not seem possible to create a rule that will subscribe a user other than oneself to a card, every member of the team must create this rule, themselves, for it to work throughout the whole team. But it works like a charm, once you have, & allows a single user to subscribe other teammates to a card while only assigning a single person as currently responsible.