I’m excited to announce that today we’re launching a brand new type of task in Asana! So instead of wasting time chasing down approvals via in-person meetings, and long email threads or spreadsheets, you can now create quick and trackable approval tasks in Asana to move forward with your work while avoiding any mistakes along the way!
If you’d like to learn how to create Approvals in Asana, or how to approve/reject/request changes for approvals you’ve been assigned, have a look at this brand new article from our Help Guide! In addition to this article, here are a couple of important things to keep in mind:
Approvals are available both on the web and mobile!
Subtasks can be marked as Approvals.
Just like tasks, anyone can complete an Approval not just the Assignee. You can use Comment-only projects to ensure that only the assignee can Approve a given task.
When I marked “Request changes” on the approval, it completed my task even though it needs more work: We recommend that you set up rules on approvals to ensure that the task gets automatically routed to the right person once the approver completes it. For example, you can select a rules trigger based on “Request changes” and route the approval task to whoever needs to make changes by using the actions “assign to” or “add collaborator.”
This update is already available to all our customers We hope you enjoy it as much as we do and we can’t wait to hear your feedback! Please post any questions you might have in the comments below and log your feedback in #productfeedback.
Love this option! Is there any talk of a Rule Action for creating a new task so that when triggered by “Request Changes” a new task can be opened where they can place those changes and then assign? In our organization, we are trying to track every step of the process so we do not want to un-mark complete or re-assign any tasks so full workloads can be tracked - if that makes sense.
Loving this new feature @Marie ! One issue I’ve already come across that you mentioned on your 3rd bullet point:
That was one of the first things I tried to set up in rules since both “Changes requested” and “Rejected” keep the task in review as Complete. Unfortunately there is currently no way to “Uncomplete” a task with Rules, therefore if any of your projects are set to “Show Incomplete tasks” by default, the Change Requested or Rejected task doesn’t show up. You have to rely on the person issuing the Approval to see the change in their Inbox (assuming they haven’t removed themselves as a task collaborator) and then uncheck the task or create a new one.
Is there an “Uncomplete” Trigger / Action in the works by chance?
Agree with the above. The Approvals feature seems great but the fact that it seems to mark the task as “complete” no matter what answer you select is causing me to have difficulty seeing how we would use it. Integrating with rules seems like the right answer, but the gaps in rules (specifically that you can’t mark the task “incomplete” or create a “clone” of the task through rules once the approval is completed) means that you are basically relying on people seeing tasks show up as “completed” in their inbox and then going in and “uncompleting” it to do whatever the follow on task is.
It seems to me that the Approval process should be separate from the Task completion status?
Hi @Olive and thank you so much for your kind feedback! That makes complete sense, but it is not possible as it stands as we don’t have (yet) an action to create and assign a task when an Approval is marked with “Changes requested”. The best option right now might be to “add a comment” and reassign the approval > this way you can at least keep track of every steps taken in the process! I’ll go ahead and escalate your feedback but can’t say just yet if this is something we will implement in the future.
@Brian_Massey, so glad to hear you’re enjoying this update! If you haven’t yet, I would recommend upvoting Rule to unmark as done or mark as "not completed" With the arrival of approvals this feature request would be even more impactful, so hopefully, this is something we can introduce soon I’m closely following feedback in the Forum and in Asana, I’ll be sure to keep you posted via this thread if I hear anything on this topic! In the meantime, if you or @Jonathan_Flowers would create a new thread in #productfeedback it would be super useful to track feedback, I’m sure a lot other users will be interested in voting for it!
What initially occurred to me upon hearing that all approvals mark the task complete was:
So then I would want the approval to be a separate task–not apply on the actual work task itself
And maybe this added approval task could be 1) a subtask of the actual work task to keep them together (and facilitate multiple approvals should the need arise), or 2) a follow-up task
And/Or make the actual work task dependent on the approval.
Would be nice to have as a trigger, not just an option within Approvals (request approval, request changes, approved… or whatever the options are), but the conversion of an existing task to an Approval task.
In that way, you could summon someone to a task when that task is ready to become on of those three options, but that that choice is someone elses.
In my case, I could be an approver of a task assigned to someone else who does performs the effort. When they feel they are done, instead of completing, they change the task to Approval Task or whatnot. That act is a Trigger, which I could then create an Action from to say, add a comment of @phil please have a look and provide approval.
I do exactly that now, but have a custom field of Stage and an option within that of Approval, which has a rule to summon me to that task. Seems to work/make sense. Was kind of surprised it wasn’t configured that way out the gate. Good stuff though. Glad to see you all expanding on Rules.
I like where Asana’s head is at with adding approvals to the mix, but unfortunately this feature is useless until “Rejected” or “Request Changes” does not complete the task.
Yes, exactly! I didn’t get that distinction at first, but that’s key to how this feature was designed to be used. As Joe Trollo expressed it in the API forum section:
The approval task represents your work reviewing some other task, and when you’ve reviewed it and declared it needs changes, your review is complete. (Later the task might be uncompleted to represent that there is new review to do, or a new approval task might be created and assigned.)
Why would you want to manually create a separate task just to approve an already existing task? Even so, if you Reject or Request Change on this separate task, it does nothing to the other task. I think a better workflow would be to just have a custom field dropdown with Approved, Reject and Request Change. Teammates would assign the task to you for Approval, you change the custom field accordingly, and assign back. How is this new approval feature any better than that?
@Marie would it be possible for someone from Asana to share how they are using Approvals in their workflow? I’m trying to implement it with our team but from my perspective it seems inferior to just using an approval custom field like @Alex_Graniere has suggested.
I love this feature but will not be able to use it because we are not “Business” users. Please add this simple feature to the Premium accounts as well.
I completely agree with @Jonathan_Flowers , I am trying so hard to understand how this is useful. If I mark a task as “changes requested” It shouldn’t be completed as changes are needed? Can you explain what the purpose of this is?
Above you mention “We recommend that you set up rules on approvals to ensure that the task gets automatically routed to the right person once the approver completes it” what happens if the person who is assigned the task is the one that makes the changes and that task is already assigned to them. Then when they mark it for approval and I for example mark it as “changes requested” which Asana then completes and then runs the rule and assigns it to the same person it is already assigned to, how does that help? As per the other comments if a rule cannot mark something as incomplete it kind of seems pointless or am I missing something? Thanks
However my feedback is the same as many here. It makes no sense for the task to be marked as Complete when it’s clicked as “Changes Requested”. Either way the task disappears from our view and there’s no follow up.
What would be great for us is to replace “Changes requested” with “Ready for Approval”. We don’t really need to see a task which has changes pending, we use sub-tasks for that. But when one of our developers thinks they’ve completed a task and needs my approval, that’s when a “Ready for Approval” feature would be very handy!
I just want to reiterate that this is a great step in the right direction. Having a solid approval workflow and custom user permissions would really bring Asana up for enterprise customers.
A great way to use the Approval task type is by adding a subtask in the task that needs approval and then assign this to te person that needs to approve the main task. This way its clear what is the task and what is the approval step. if you really want you can then set the task as dependent on the approval subtask. Here is a short video to show how it could work
We hope you enjoy it as much as we do and we can’t wait to hear your feedback! Please post any questions you might have in the comments below and log your feedback in #productfeedback.
I’m closely following feedback in the Forum and in Asana, I’ll be sure to keep you posted via this thread if I hear anything on this topic! In the meantime, if you or 