Apply Rule Action to Parent Task

I know I can do this in Flowsana, but it would really be so much more powerful and convenient if the Asana Rules Builder (including AI Studio) was able to apply the action of a rule to the parent of the task that triggers the rule. There are so many scenarios where we want to update something on the parent task based on changes happening to a sub-task.

I just did a search and I don’t see this anywhere in Asana’s product roadmap/ideas, so I’m creating this topic to at least get it on the idea list so people can contribute and vote on the idea. Please feel free to merge if there is already a related topic somewhere!

Below is an example AI instruction related to this. It actually appears to work pretty well (see screen shot of reasoning and comment it generates), but it doesn’t actually update the parent task’s Task Status (I assume because the rules engine has no way to do that).

Your goal is to determine if the user has changed the Task Status of a task in the ourWork project that has Task Type = “Sub-Task” or “Develop” to a value that indicates the task itself is completed (the development work), which means the parent task should be transitioned to Task Status = “Ready to Deploy”. Sometimes users mistakenly change the develop sub-task to “Ready to Deploy” instead of just marking it completed and changing the parent task to “Ready to Deploy”.

In addition, anytime a user marks a sub-task of type “Sub-Task” or “Develop” as completed, if the parent task has Task Status “Ready To Start” or “In Progress”, we want to automatically transition the parent task to Task Status = “Ready to Deploy”.

Finally, if the task that triggers this rule is not already marked completed (e.g., if the user mistakenly set it to “Ready to Deploy”), then we want to set that task Completed (check the completed checkbox).

We also want to leave a comment on the task that triggers this rule that indicates what has been done to it and to the parent task.

Hi @Tony_Sileo

If understood your usercase properly, you can now do this in Asana with rules.

I have just built this workflow on a new project. The workflow is. built based on one custom field which is the only thing manually updated in the entire workflow.

The button is ‘Ready for Progress’.
Whne yes is selected, the condistions are to check couple of custom fields, and that all subtasks are complete

Action is to progress the ticket to a new stage.
We have that built to move the tasks to 6 different stages, and each stage has its own set of subtasks.

Hope this helps a bit.