Deputies and dynamic targets
In the "assign the responsible person" and "send a notification" actions you don't have to pick a specific person. A dynamic target is resolved when the rule runs — the rule aims at a role, not a name, so a staffing change never breaks it.
The three kinds of dynamic targets
- Deputy of the responsible person — whoever covers for the person responsible on the goal. Looked up first in the org structure (deputies of the positions the person holds); if there is none, the personal deputy from Organization settings applies (the "Deputy" column of the members table).
- Holder of position X — whoever currently holds the position or function. The reference is the position, not a name: renaming the position or swapping the holder breaks nothing.
- Deputy of position X — the stand-in of that specific position. A deputy belongs to the position, not to the person: Paul may cover for Peter the quality manager, while Thomas covers for Peter the internal auditor.
Positions and deputies are managed by an administrator in the deputies table — more on the Org structure page:
When the target cannot be resolved
Nothing crashes and nothing is lost silently: the action is skipped openly and the run log states the reason in plain language — "has no deputy", "the position is vacant", "the position no longer exists". The rule is not considered broken and no alert e-mail is sent.
A special case: a person holds several positions with different deputies and the rule says "hand over to the deputy of the responsible person". The notification then goes to all of their deputies (informing more people breaks nothing), but the hand-over itself is skipped with advice to target a specific position in the rule — silently picking one of them would reassign responsibility at random.