Can I assign more than one person to an issue on a kanban board?

[Deleted user]

It would be really useful to assign a few people to an issue as I see that a place to form a team for it. Please help. 

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

No, you cannot assign an issue to multiple people in Jira - there can only be one person who is the assignee/owner of the issue. 

So organization will use the Team field so more people have eyes on it or work concurrently. 

Or you can create a new custom field that is a Group Picker type field or Multi-user Picker type field. Then you can add a group or multiple people to the custom field. 

[Deleted user]

Thanks John, can yo please explain how I create a new custom field so add multiple people

[John Funk]

Sure - go to Settings > Issues > Custom Fields

Click on the Create custom field button in the upper right

Click on the All link on the left side

Then click on the User Picker (multiple users) option near the bottom (they are in alphabetical order). 

Be sure to add any context needed for the field. 

[Deleted user]

Thanks again John, that doesn't seem to be an option when I click on settings. I get this:-

Sorry to be a pain but any advice would be very gratefully received. Do you know if there is Jira guru I could speak over phone/video to help in general? Thanks again,

Tom

[John Funk]

You will need to be a Jira Administrator to create shared Custom Fields. 

What type of project is this? 

[Deleted user]

Ah ok well I may have to contact our business administrators.

I'm thinking of using a Kanban board to get overview of each project that we have over the course of the year. I was intending to have a column for each month and each issue would represent a project. The thing is there will be multiple people on each project (issue). It may be that there is better way to address this. Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks John

[John Funk]

It would be really strange to see a column on a Kanban board for each month. What is it that you are really trying to accomplish?

[Francisco Lagos]

Hi John, I have created the custom field but i can't see it in the create issue screen, what am i doing wrong? Thanks in advance.

[John Funk]

Hi @Francisco Lagos  - Make sure you add the field to the screen used by the project. 

[V B]

Hi John, I challenged my Agile Coach as we a JIRA story can't have multiple users assigned or it can't be rotated among the team. Is there a solid reason as to why it can be rotated among the team and only one person should be accountable for a story while the its entire teams responsibility? 

[John Funk]

Basically, I would say that when everybody is responsible for something, then nobody is responsible for it. There might be multiple people working on the item, but there should be one person responsible for seeing the the card and information are getting updated and moved as needed. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

In methodologies that fit in with Agile, there are broadly two ways to have an assignee. 

One is "the assignee is the single person currently responsible for getting the issue done (emphasis on the single - there can be no doubt that "someone else is doing it"). 

The other is to give it to a team, not a person.  Scrum and Kanban align the boards with a team - you don't use the assignee field to give an issue to an individual or a group of people, the fact that an issue appears on a team's working board (or backlog if they have it) means the team is "assigned" to it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

No and yes.

Assignee is the field that holds the single person responsible for the issue.  It is never right to assign an issue to two people (well, one case, but it's actually irrelevant in that case).  So assignee will not do it.

But you can indicate that other users might be involved or interested via fields that allow you to add more users - watchers might be used sometimes, but most of us reach for a custom field - a single or multi-user picker, or sometimes a group when that's appropriate.

[V B]

Thank you for your response.

[No Name]

@John Funk Thank you for your solution. I've added the Group Picker type field so I can assign multiple people to a task.

Do you know how I can have this field appear under the "People" Column when I click on an issue? Much like how the Assignee field is readily available to be edited without having to click on "Edit" for an issue, I'd like the Group picker field to be there even if I haven't originally added multiple users when I originally created the issue.

Right now it only shows up if I have originally added multiple users

[John Funk]

Hi - can you share a screenshot of exactly where you are talking? There are a lop of places that "people" appear in Jira. 

[Dina Abushaban]

Hi John,

I am not sure if this is what am looking for, but basically an issue needs to be sent to 2 people, and whenever one of these 2 people finishes their issue, they can move their issue to the next step.

is this something doable?

attaching a screenshot of the workflow 

[Mishelle Hall]

@John Funk 

Thanks for the answer, I actually worked, but my team does not receive the email when assign as with the single person responsible. Can you please advise how they can get the email notification?