Let’s be honest. Right now senior decisionmakers and stakeholders aren’t comfortable using Asana’s approval type tasks to confirm approval on high-stakes deliverables. That won’t be fixed until it’s more controlled and there are more options than “Approve”. (Frankly, it should also be something they can reply to an email notice with, but that’s a seperate issue).
Approval-Type Tasks Should Only Be Editable by the Assignee, and It Should Be More Easily Auditable
The fact that anyone can check an approval task as complete makes it functionally useless for sensitive tasks. I need to be able to set a default somewhere that approval tasks can only be marked as approved by the assigned account, with a flag at the top of the account with the date + time of approvals. Perhaps a full feed of approvals with timestamps of when it was “sent” for approval - they were tagged as the assignee - would be good, too.
Email approvals are outdated, clunky, and time consuming to track, and easily lost. But an email approval on high stakes issues like a large budget, on a creative launch, or messaging means I can audit exactly when the item was sent for approval, and who exactly approved it and when.
Proposal:
Replace Checkbox W/ Dropdown that Only Assignee Can Edit
Approved (a dialogue box popus up for feedback)
Revise & Resubmit (a dialogue box popus up for feedback)
Denied (a dialogue box popus up for feedback)
Additional dream scenario - stakeholders assigned the approval task get an email saying “XYZ is ready for your approval w/ all of the fields and links/attachments, they can reply with “approved - [written notes]” and it updates the task appropriately.