Ultimately would like this to be part of Asana but in the interim open to hearing about third party workarounds.
We have certain projects with lots of tasks that each have lots of subtasks which are completed in the same order every time, with each sub-task being a pre-requisite blocker for the ones that come after it. For instance, a marketing campaign might have a task for each email that will be sent over the course of a month, with subtasks for defining the audience and A/B testing details, drafting copy, securing copy approval, designing the email, and finally launching the email and adding a link to its performance report to the project’s reporting area.
For high-level managers/directors who are just trying to see at a glance how the campaign is going, they don’t want to have to unfold every individual email to see which subtask is currently being worked on for each task, so we have a Status column where each possible value corresponds to a subtask: Not Yet Begun, Content in Progress, Content Under Review, Approved and In Production, and Launched. Right now we have to rely on individuals to remember when they check off their subtask to also change the status of the parent task to reflect that progress. I would love to be able to set up custom rules like: “When Audience and Testing Details subtask is complete, change parent task status to Content In Progress,” “When Draft Copy subtask is complete, change parent task status to Content Under Review,” and so on.
In the screenshot, imagine replacing “Priority” with “Status,” and that’s the rule you need for each step in your process.
It relies on your only having a single subtask incomplete at a time, so as you can see, it adds the next subtask as part of the rule, in addition to updating the parent task’s Status (shown by Priority here).
Given what you wrote about your process, I believe this should work.
Sorry I missed your reply a few months ago, Larry! Unfortunately if I’m understanding the idea correctly I don’t think this will work for us, because the people working on the subtasks would be hampered if the subtasks weren’t created or assigned to them until the previous one has been completed. They need to see the tasks ahead of time to be able to plan their week based on upcoming deliverables, and we also need a place where we can attach related assets and have conversations related to the subtask that might need to be attached/discussed before the previous subtask is completed. While we could keep all attachments and threads related to all subtasks in the parent task, we’d rather be able to use all the functionality of subtasks.
Further detail that might be useful is that many of our team members cross-add the subtasks they’re responsible for within a team Project to also be associated with a personal Project as a parent-level task, as unlike My Tasks, having a personal Project where subtasks are elevated to parent tasks allows them to sort those tasks into Categories and create subtasks-of-subtasks that can reflect their own intermediary steps to completing the deliverable and keep all those child subtasks grouped and rolling up to/sortable by attributes of the parent subtask (in the team Project)/parent task (in the personal Project).
But since you said the subtasks are the same, then perhaps use of the Incomplete filter for the project (which applies to subtasks as they appear in the main list view) could help. Note below how the Task 1 row, without expansion shows the status that there are two incomplete subtasks (though four subtasks total; two are complete):
I.e. the rule is set to trigger just on changes to subtasks, and the real key is that the rule’s action is set to be applied to the parent of the triggering subtask. Let me know if you have any questions about this.
