Ability to view assigned subtasks in Portfolio Workload

Our team is trying to build out our product roadmap and recently utilized the product roadmap template. It’s been great, but we’re still missing the capability of tracking workload in there.

Background:
Our roadmap has 3 main sections and roadmap items under each. We added the true tasks people are working on as subtasks to those roadmap items, so each has an owner, timeframe and estimated hours.

From what I can tell, I can only track workload in a portfolio, so I made a portfolio and added my product roadmap as the “work”. Unfortunately on the workload tab, it only pulls data from who’s owning each roadmap item, instead of the owners of each subtask that make up a roadmap item.

Is there any way to do this in a better way? We want to identify who would be over / under utilized throughout time.

Thanks!

Hi @anon13627270, thanks for reaching out! As it stands, subtasks do not inherit the Project from the parent task, the only way for them to show in your Workload, for now, is by manually adding them to the Project. You can find the steps in this article: How to Use Asana subtasks | Product guide • Asana Product Guide

This is a popular request in the Forum, and this feature is definitely on our radar, but we do not have a timeframe to share yet. If you don’t mind, I’m merging your post with the existing thread on this topic. Please make sure you leave your vote there!

@anon13627270 - We’ve been waiting for 4+ years for them to solve some of the issues they have with the relationship between subtasks and parent tasks. The current architecture limits this from being a possibility and it would take a major undertaking to resolve it—so I wouldn’t plan on it anytime soon.

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What I’d love to know from Asana is whether or not they consider it a flaw, or if they are just sticking with their initial design decision :thinking:

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Asanas lack of communication is increasingly frustrating. Especially with things like subtasks which have a huge impact on the portfolio, workload and rules (and other) featuresets.

Especially with competitors catching up with asana more and more.

How Asana can actively encourage people in some guides to use subtasks while ignoring all their flaws really is beyond me. That’s just terrible product management and setting people up for failure.

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Agreed @Bastien_Siebman, it would be nice to know for sure.

They’ve mentioned in the past that the relationship between subtasks and parent tasks is something they’re planning to tackle in the future (though it seems like they’ve been at it for a while), so I’m hoping that’s an indication that it’s not a case of them sticking to their initial design decision and more to do with the fact that it would be a major undertaking to completely overhaul the way their architecture works.

Hi @Julia_Forbes, we continue working on improving times, in fact we made shipped some very recently (see Timeline Show - Hide Sections, Tasks, Subtasks Sidebar Option , We’re replacing the current task pane on Timeline with a slide in task pane! and Section Dividers in Timeline :slight_smile: )

We’re aware subtasks on timeline are a popular request, we recently implemented them in Lists and Board project (see You can now see and action subtasks directly from your Project task list! and Subtasks in Board View ) so I’m confident we will implement them into other views like Timeline. I’ll make sure to keep you posted in the Forum as soon as I have an update on this topic!

Hi @Bastien_Siebman, @Nicolas_Fischer and @Skyler! Thanks for sharing your feedback. We have explained this a couple of times in the Forum, but because of how subtasks were built in the first place, there is no easy way implement this change. Updating subtasks in Asana is technically a lot harder than what it looks like, and while we haven’t nailed it down yet, we’ve made some progress recently and these features were launched:

  1. You can now see and action subtasks directly from your Project task list!
  2. Custom fields needed on subtasks
  3. Subtask status/indicators in boards
  4. Tree view for task and subtasks
  5. Subtasks in Board View
  6. Clearly indicate if a task contain subtask

We are also working on implementing subtasks on Project Dashboards, stay tune for updates soon in our announcements category.

We continue to bring this up in most of our meetings with Product to make sure we keep this conversation open and continue to evaluate solutions for all features like Portfolio and Workload. We will post an update as soon as we have more one!

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I’ve definitely seen progress. Hence my comments that I’m holding out hopes that the engineering team and find a solution that aligns the business strategy of Asana with this popular request. :raised_hands:

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I guess my biggest question is: does Asana want to change the way subtasks behave (not belonging to the project) or do they just want to add some features here and there to make it easier for everyone to work with these constraints.

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Hi,

Is there a way for a subtask’s assigned effort to be reflected in a person’s workload view?

Currently, only the tasks’ effort get reflected in the workload, even when the effort’s estimate has been specified in the subtask field.

Thanks,
Magda

Hi @Magda_Mendygrał

Welcome to the forum. This is a very good request.
There is a product feedback thread that is live. I suggest you upvote it. Here is the link:

@Emily_Roman @Rebecca_McGrath could you please help me merge this comment into the active thread? Many thanks!

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There is a lot of collaboration work within each team in our company and we don’t want to put every single small task as a task on each project to avoid a long overwhelming project interface. However, we want to calculate everyone’s workload in the portfolios including all the subtasks. I can’t find a better solution other than stop using subtasks to get an accurate number in the workload view. Can we update this feature?

Hi @Yuyan_Huang, welcome to the Asana Community Forum and thanks for sharing your feedback with us! We already have a thread on this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with Ability to view assigned SUBTASKS in Portfolio>Workload to consolidate feedback. As a workaround, you can create a search report of all the subtasks, multi-select and add them to the project, this will make all subtasks data to appear in your workload.

Hi All, I agree this should be a standard feature but I have determined my own workaround that is working nicely for my team. This may have been discussed in earlier posts, so forgive me if I am repeating a known technique. Workaround as follows:

  1. Establish a template task for your particular project using the customization feature located at the upper right toolbar of the asana display (just under your account image).
  2. Create a subtask within the template task and go to the details section of the template subtask. Link this subtask with the project you are looking to populate in the workload view of the Portfolio feature Shortcut to evoke the project directory “TAB+P”. Click done.
  3. Now that you have a template task and associated subtask with the established link to your desired project, the subtasks will show up under the portfolio workload view. However, there is one issue with another simple workaround. Each time the template task is used to create a new task, a new entry will appear in the list or board view sections. So, create a section that you will essentially hide to the bottom (if in list view) or to the far right (in board view) use to dump these so it will never occupy your display space. Then, go back to your template task to define the section in which you want this basically useless entry to live, but out of your view.
  4. With these settings, as long as you start your new task with a template tasks that has these properties, you won’t have to do anything else manually.

You will now be able to see your workload views populate under the assigned individuals responsibilities. It’s far from perfect but it sort of gets the job done until ASANA releases an update with a more streamlined approach.



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Justin_Poma I am a bit confused by your solution, but also intrigued. Basically any time you want to create a task in this project, you actually use the task template, and every time you want a subtask you use the one that has been provided? And the “trick” is that the subtask is already multi-homed so you save some time + make sure you don’t forget to multi-home it? What if you want multiple subtasks?

Can you set up a rule in your project templates that anytime a subtask is created it is added to the project? If so how would that look. As a project Manager manually adding every sub task to the project is a lot of overhead.

@anon37587516 at the moment you can’t target subtasks with Rules, because they don’t technically belong to the project…

In a Template if I add all the subtasks to the “Template Project” when I create a “New Project” from that Template what project will the subtasks be associated with the “New Project” or the “Template Project”

@anon37587516 - They’ll be associated with the new project.