Approvals - Request change should keep the task incomplete

Hello Asana community ! :sunglasses:

Once approvals were introduced into Asana we got really excited as it gave us another option to keep correct track of our task progress.

However we see that whenever you mark Approval as “Request Change” task is marked as “completed” in the “eyes of Asana” and is grayed out. Rules take it as completed and that is a risky business. I understand this option as: “Hey buddy I need more information please change it or add it into the task” as compared to “OK I need more information to this task but consider it closed.”

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I might have missed option how to find a workaround (besides using complex rules within each project).

It would be great to keep tasks “Open” if we mark them Request Change and close them only if we choose Approve or Reject as those are “final statuses”. :slight_smile:

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Hi @Matej_Cuchran :wave:t3:

This is currently an expected behaviour, but this is a popular request, so thanks for creating this thread; hopefully this is something we can improve in the future!

In the meantime, we recommend using subtask for asking approval, this way the subtask gets completed when the approver request changes or approve it, but your actionable task remains incomplete! You can check out this other conversation on the same topic!

Hope this helps!

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Hi @Marie :v:

That’s actually very clever solution to the challenge.
I will inform my teams to adjust accordingly.

Thank you !

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For approvals, changes requested and rejected should not complete the task in favor of simply denoting the task was not approved.

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Hi @anon87549050, welcome to the community forum and thanks for taking the time to submit your feedback with us!

We already have a thread in the #productfeedback category requesting the option to keep the task incomplete when it is mark as “Request changes”. I recommend you to upvote for this request as well!

I’ve gone ahead and slightly updated the title of this thread to make it more specific to the “Reject” option. I hope you don’t mind!

Thanks again for your feedback!

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Asana treats an approval task marked “Changes Requested” as a complete task–it disappears from your “incomplete tasks” list like any other tasks, even though the approval (or disapproval) is not complete. It’s not complete. Changes were requested. There is still work to do before this gets check off the list.

As is, all the approval box really seems to do is let you complete tasks, but with a different color. That’s not very useful.

2 Likes

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
When a user marks an approval task as ‘rejected’ or ‘request changes’, the task behaves as if it is completed and disappears from a users ‘my tasks’ area.

This means when we reassign a task because changes are needed, the user can’t see the task that has been assigned to them, or, a person can’t keep track of tasks that have not been approved.

Steps to reproduce:
Mark a task as an approval task.
Select ‘request changes’ or ‘rejected’
The task disappears from the assignees ‘my task’ list

Browser version:
Chrome and Safari

Hi @Jenny_Hickman, thanks for taking the time to submit your feedback with us!

Currently, the Approvals feature is working as normal in Asana, this is not a bug. However, I completely understand where you’re coming from here!

We already have a thread in the #productfeedback category requesting the option to keep the task incomplete when it is marked as “Request changes”. I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the existing thread to consolidate feedback!

I’ll let you know if any changes are made here :slight_smile:

We kept running into all sorts of problems with this and I had chalked it up to a bug, but finally looked into it and surprised to see it’s functioning as intended. From my understanding of this, it seems to come down to a philosophical difference of approach, in a manner of speaking.

I’m seeing that Asana as a product seems to value keeping tasks actionable and is built around the entire premise of trying to move work forward through the completion of tasks. While I generally agree with sentiment, I think in practice through my experience using Asana, adherence to this approach can create really rigid use cases without much room for some degree of flexibility.

As a Creative Agency, we too value keeping tasks actionable and manageable. It’s a great philosophy and in practice leads to more work getting done. However, we also have a smaller team and have to rely on our team’s ability to move work forward with less discreet tasks. In our experience, it’s an entire job for someone to be assigning tasks in the fashion of: Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5, etc. It’s a lot to manage.

So when we saw the Approval feature we were really excited! It seemed like a great way to balance our desire to create actionable tasks and work in a well organized system, while not having to micro-manage tasks down to the last detail. We’ve set up some smaller work where the task is really a deliverable. We set the deliverable as the approval item. Then the Designer posts their design, sets a status that it’s ready for review and a Reviewer leaves feedback and then marks “Changes requested”. However, Asana marking this done makes no sense in this workflow. The deliverable is not done. More work is needed to move it achieve that and that feedback has been left.

While I appreciate the suggested workaround to use subtasks as approval tasks, that’s more steps to do and more to manage. Now instead of one task that we can move towards completion through the handy Approval system and our thoughtful feedback, we have to distill things into tasks: Do this, do that, do this, do that. And on top of that, each time we create one, we have to click several times to turn it into an Approval task. All of this adds up time wise and in some instances devolves into busy work or feeling like we have to “manage” Asana. Asana is supposed to help ease OUR work, not create more work for us.

I understand not wanting to dilute your products focus and I really respect/appreciate that Asana has a clear focus, vs so many of the jack of all trades master of none tools (i.e. Monday.com). I know that making everyone happy erodes product focus over time. That said, I think there is something here to consider.

We love Asana and will likely continue to use it, but sometimes it feels like decisions are made on some overly narrow use case of: tasks, tasks, TASKS, TASKS, MORE TASKS!! And sometimes it a bit much. Tasks have their place. They are critical. But too many tasks starts to contribute to loss of focus when what’s really needed are tools and systems that reduce busy work and allow teams who trust each other to know how to proceed without everything being distilled down to binary tasks. I believe Asana is really, really close to providing that environment through clever systems, but this is a good example where I think you may not be seeing the whole picture.

Well intended additions to the product that ultimately don’t streamline work, they create more work.

10 Likes

A couple of reasons why it doesn’t work for us in it’s current state.

  1. What everyone has already mentioned. The task being functionally marked complete when marked needs more, or reject
 disappearing from the incomplete tasks

  2. Dependencies don’t really block approvals. How does one know if the task was done before approving? Nothing really changes to the approval, like it does with a task. (A task that is blocked by another is greyed out until it’s dependent task is completed, not the case with approvals.)
  3. If a 2nd approval is needed past the first approval (another dependency), If the 1st approval is marked reject, or needs more
 the 2nd approval is now ready to go. The dependency is removed.

This means I can’t even use ruled to promoted tasks once their dependent tasks are approved, because they are promoted if the 1st task is either marked needs more work, or rejected!

The other big problem for me in my quarterly process I’ve built, is that I can’t use subtasks because of various limitations with subtasks. So I have a lot of tasks in my templates
 no subtasks. (Which is another issue in itself, but why we can’t use subtasks to nest approvals.)

I’ll just stick with tasks. Approvals isn’t going to work.

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Was there any further update to this issue from the Asana team? Its completely illogical to mark a request changes task as complete. Can an option be added to enable this functionality?

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+1 vote for me! This seems utterly obvious; I am not done with my task/subtask if I’ve requested changes and am waiting to get them back. My next-in-line in the string of dependencies is NOT ready for their step in the process!

There was a suggested workaround using Custom Fields to show status of a task/subtask as approved or awaiting changes, but this is problemmatic for sub-tasks. Even if i give the parent task a Custom Field, and inherit that field into my subtask, that field does not show up in My Tasks view, so I have no way of identifying which of my tasks are waiting for “changes requested.” I have to take the additional step to create a tag of the same and then show tags in My Tasks view just so I can locate these items.

How much better if, when I mark my subtask “changes requested,” this yellow icon continues stay there in My Tasks and I can see at a glance who I need to bug for their revisions!

1 Like

I have a workflow that is triggered to move to a specific section called “Ready to Review” once an approval is set to “Changes Requested,” however there is another rule that moves a task to the “Complete” section once the task is marked as complete.

The issue is that when you change the approval stage to anything (even “Rejected,” which makes no sense), Asana marks that as complete.

I have the rules set to not be able to trigger off of other rules, but the task is moving to “Ready to Review” and then it moves it to “Complete.” I believe I could edit the sequence of which the workflows trigger, thus making it move to “Complete,” and then it moves to “Ready for Review,” but the more complicated I make this board with workflows the more issues this will create.

Visual below:

Additionally, I don’t understand the logic behind why an approval change would mark a task as complete, especially if it’s rejected or if changes are rejected, as that obviously means the task isn’t completed! “Approved” makes sense, otherwise I’m curious behind the reasoning.

Any help would be appreciated!

2 Likes

For background, here’s how many are using approvals and what I think was behind the design, basically that the approval is specifically that narrow action, it’s not the task itself, and when it’s been done, it’s complete, irrespective of the work of the task itself.

Larry

Another vote for keeping the task open when not rejected or changes are requested. The current behaviour is too dangerous for us to have our users start working with this functionality - it would just get us into trouble.

On top of that, ideally it would be great to see upstream dependencies notified in some fashion. If I complete a “Design this product” task, which then unblocks an approval task, and that approval task rejects or requests changes, the “Design this product” task should be notified that the approval didn’t pass and therefore there is more work to be done.

1 Like

Sharing my workaround for this in the screenshot.

  • Context: I manage a design team.

  • Workflow: A task created from our form is marked as “Review” in a status field by a designer. A trigger moves the task to the ‘Out for Review’ section, changes it to an “Approval”-task and posts a comment alerting the collaborator (form submitter) their request is ready to be reviewed. Another trigger sends a custom email via Flowsana as a redundancy for alerting the collaborator their request is ready. The collaborator then has three options: Approve, Request Changes, or Reject. You can see where this is going


Without reading any manual, using this feature for the first time should go one of two ways. Unfortunately we have the less intuitive of the two options here. And you can see that in the language on the Rule Trigger itself.

It’s not “Approval Completed”, it’s “Approval Request”. Voting for change.

Screen Shot 2023-01-31 at 4.12.44 PM

Also vote to have the option to change this functionality. If I am requesting changes or rejecting, then this task is not complete. I won’t be using approvals until this is changed.

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While my team uses actionable Boolean tasks for our internal creative review process, we rely heavily on approval tasks when submitting content for legal & SME review. It would help us significantly if setting approval status to “Request changes” or “Reject” would not trigger a dependency completion.

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Welcome to the new folks to this thread, and to all, respectfully


I would not count on this request ever being addressed because implementing the requested change would break many customers’ years-long usage and workflows. (Or at least I don’t see any way that could be prevented upon satisfying this request.)

Many of us typically use subtasks for approval-type tasks for this reason. More at:

Thanks,

Larry

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I’m having a serious issue with the behaviour of approvals, especially when connected to a rule or dependency.

The identical case has been described here already but was never solved: Wrong notification about the status of an approval task - #3 by Daniel_Zweier

Basically and technically speaking, an approval currently seems to be considered as done even if you “Request changes”—and as a consequence resolves dependencies although they aren’t actually resolved. This doesn’t reflect workflow best practice and really needs to be corrected soon. :pray:

I would appreciate if this was prioritized somehow. It’s a very conflicting behavior on a fundamental part of the tool that’s been existing for a very long time now.

1 Like