Asana template inheritance manager

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Background

Currently I manage a series of project templates that are IT work tracking checklists. These checklists are far too robust for task templates, and I use them in a team/project agnostic style. My organizational pattern is to use nested portfolios to sort work into useable bins, and work is tracked using these directories over a standard team panel with related projects contained within.

Issue

A problem I experience often is whenever I need to make a change to a process, I need to go through my massive list of project templates and update that change by hand. This means reviewing most of my templates and a lot of copy pasting work. My remedy is to have a control doc that I make changes to, then copy those changes across Asana, but it’s error prone and time consuming.

Suggestion

It would be incredible to have a template manager! Features I would like to see include:

  1. Replaceable parts that can be used in multiple different templates

If template A and template B use task A, I want to be able to update task A, push that change, and see the change in both templates A and B.

  1. Flow chart overview so I can determine what elements a template inherits from others

If template A and B both have task A, only template A has task B, and neither have task C, I would like to see the fact that template A inherits tasks A and B, whereas template B only inherits task A.

  1. Ability to choose whether or not to push changes to current, non-archived projects

I created an instance of template A, but I since added task C to the template. I want to include task C on all of my non-archived projects, so I push this change to them without having to copy it by hand

  1. Ability to archive templates themselves

Template C is a legacy process that we seldom use anymore. I want to archive it for research and in the off chance we need to use it again

  1. Copy templates between teams and projects quickly

Task D is a generally helpful task that touches many different teams in my organization. I want to be able to copy this template to those teams quickly so that individuals without access to the inheritance manager can use them

Sign-off

Thank you for looking over my feature request! Generally, any support for templates is welcome!

Steven

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Hi,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. We suggest you break those into individual messages, each one going to an existing thread or a new thread.

That way the community can vote on one item.

Thanks