It would be really nice if Asana had a way to have approval built in for tasks. Let me explain:
Say I have a task for a brochure I’m developing. It’s in a Project, and that Project has a custom field set up for the status of the brochure. When we have finished developing the piece, I need to order it. However, ordering product has it’s own approval process. It would be nice if somehow in Asana, in the task, I could fill out all the order specs and quote information (perhaps a custom field for this), but then that information, once entered, sends to the approving officer, to where she simply clicks “approved” or “denied”, and then that task updates with that order approval status. You can do all this in long-abouts via comments in a task, but that gets messy as different people do things differently. Just some way send and receive an approval in a step in a task, if that makes sense.
Kind of like an “if this then that” maybe? “if this custom field is set to that, then send this custom email”? That’d get the first half of the approval taken care of, which would even be better than it is, because at the very least the email could say “this task is ready for your approval. Please check it.” To go the distance, though, that email would have an “approve”/“deny” option, which would kick back into the Asana task once selected.
I wonder if you could use reports to make this easier. If you have custom fields for all your order specs, you could have a report that shows you all tasks where these fields are “not blank” i.e. all order specs have been supplied. The approving officer then makes it a daily habit to check this report and can then update the order approval status.
Another idea would be to have a template task for your brochure that have 2 subtasks “Approved” “Denied” on which you are a collaborator. When you are done you assign them to the approving officer and wait for the notification “‘Approved’ has been completed” for example…
You can also write “Approve/Deny” in the subtask and the officer has to remove the part he doesn’t want and check the task, the end result would be the same.
It would be nice to add approve or deny button to the task in the same way we add a dependent task. Because of its basically a dependent subtask. And it should just show up with a button and maybe a way to comment so you can enter why you denied or approved. The button would then shot off a notification like any subtask would when complete to the inbox of who the assignee is the parent task.
My feeling is that “deny” or “approve” is very “process-specific” where Asana is staying very generic. Unless it is something that can be activated on a per-task basis.
+1000 for this request. I am currently using another project manager for work and I wish I could suggest we switch to Asana, but this is a point of contention. We work on a lot of projects with internal partners and we need the approve feature. The recommendations above are great, but are too manual and don’t account for multiple approvers or are not friendly for larger groups or groups where the approver isn’t necessarily a manager. Having an approval feature where you could tag different people to approve or deny, and make it function like a task (with due dates and reminders) would be helpful.
Yes this is important for us too. I have a CMO who hates being ‘assigned to tasks’. He just wants to be notified when he has to approve something. He doesn’t want more ‘tasks’.
Hello from the Asana User Experience Research team!
We’re working on some improvements to support creative teams with their approval workflows.
If you’re available next week (11/26/18- 11/30/18) to share your feedback on our early designs, we’d love to chat over a 45-minute video call. You would receive a $75 Amazon gift card in exchange for your time.
If you’re interested in participating, please tell us a bit more about you using this quick survey: Share your feedback: Asana Proofing + Approvals
We’ll follow up shortly if you’re a match for this study. Thank you!
The same case, also my CMO don’t want to log in to Asana for doing approval. He wants just click one button in email. Is it possible to get this fiture?
I’m more than happy to announce that it is now possible to create approval tasks in Asana We have recently implemented this feature and you can learn more about it the following announcement: A new type of task is available in Asana. Meet Approvals!
We hope you enjoy it! I’m closing this thread now but if you have any follow-up questions or feedback to share please let us know here or in the #productfeedback category ! We’ll be more than happy to help you!
We have recently implemented this feature and you can learn more about it the following announcement: