Dividing/distributing tasks and evenly between odd number of people

Hi,
I would allocate based on a rotation of the 5 recipients.
Have a column in your list that keeps track of the recipient which stores the number 1 to 5.
The workflow would look up the number of the last recipient on the previous item, add one and populate the column of the new item. When the last number hits 5 it resets back to 1.
In the workflow you could have a switch statment with 5 branches and the workflow goes down the appropriate branch number based on the number in the column.
You could make this more dynamic by having a list with the 5 recipients and lookup that list to find the recipient based on the number and just have one task action in the workflow instead of 5 in a switch action.

To find the last item in the list just subtract 1 from the current item ID.
If items are likely to be deleted which would break the above you could do a lookup on the list to gather all the ID's and then use the MAX() inline function to find the highest ID or do a POP collection operation to get the last ID in the collection.

Thank you Simon,

This ended up working for a Site Workflow. Thanks so much.

Do you think there is a way to have this as a lit workflow instead?

I ask becasue I have one workflow that does basic cleanup then another that runs right after the assigning to update other fields and send a task. It would be most effecient to have all three of these workflows consolidated into one BUT, what I found with doing this as a list workflow is that since its firing on all items basically at the same time, all items end up getting assigned to person #1.

How would looking at the workflow instance ID work? 

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@SimonMuntz wrote:
Hi,
Workflow instance was just a suggestion to get a random number.
How about looking at the item ID.
Then say if it ends in
1 or 6 give it to number 1
2 or 7 give it to number 2
3 or 8 give it to number 3
4 or 9 give it to number 4
5 or 0 give it to number 5

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That definely sounds like it could work. I'd say its worth playing with. I'll give it a try and see what happens. :)