Differences in Task Assignment and Delegation

There are two basic differences between assigning a task and delegating a task:

Tasks can be assigned to users, groups, and roles; tasks can be delegated only to individual users.

Assignment and delegation information is displayed separately in the task's Details View tab. When a task is assigned, only the current user, group, and role assignments appear in the Assigned To field; there is no display of who applied the assignment action. When a task is delegated, the complete "delegation trail" appears in the Delegation field. That is, it displays the user delegating the task and the user to whom the task was delegated, for all delegations actions. For example:

Delegation:

user1 -> user2
user2 -> user3

indicates that the task was initially delegated from user1 to user2, and then delegated from user2 to user3. Both delegation and assignment information is also available as details of chronological Task Updated operations on the Audit View tab. For more information about task delegation, see Delegating Tasks.

Essentially, task assignment can be viewed as an administrative or managerial function, whereas task delegation can be viewed as a user-oriented (or peer-to-peer) activity. The task assignment and task delegation actions each have a separate permission, and can be granted jointly or independently of one another. For more information about providing permissions, see Configuring Task Access Permissions.