Groups and Departments

In Shotgun, you can assign people to Groups and Departments on the People page.

Groups

Groups are used for addressing or assigning. You can create groups of users, and then either assign a Group to a Task, or you can address Notes and Tickets (and other threaded entities) to a Group. The users in the group will then get a notification when the Note is created. One user can be in many Groups.

Departments

Departments was introduced with the Crew Planning app, and is a way to define users according to expertise (at least in the Crew Planning context). For example, you can create a filter to only show users in a particular department. No notifications are sent based on a user's departments, and a user can only be in one department.

When to use Groups and Departments

Studios often create more groups than departments. You might create a group for a specific project, or even a particular scene. That way, you can easily notify a wide range of people tasked on the same work. Departments tend to be used more broadly to define users. For example, in a 100 person studio, you might want to know how many people are in the animation department.