Auto-Populate a Project Date Range

For the Project date range (i.e. what’s visible in the Portfolio entry and on the Progress tab), can the range be auto-populated based on the earliest task start date and latest task due date?

Hey @Eston_Melton, thanks so much for this great feedback.

This is currently not possible but I can certainly see how this would improve your daily Asana experience. I have also slightly edited your threads name to allow other Forum members to find it more easily, I hope you don’t mind!

I assume by “not possible” you mean “not on our current roadmap” or something to that extent. Obviously it’s possible since a single SQL query (or whatever database flavor you use) could pull the earliest and latest due date very quickly and easily for any given project.

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:+1:

Hey @David_Dude, welcome to the Asana Community Forum :wave:

I would recommend having a look at Flowsana to see if it could help improve the automation capabilities of your Asana projects!

In the meantime please feel free to also vote for this request should you not have done this already :blush:

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We’ve explored Flowsana, though I’m not particularly enamored with it given its slow performance detecting changes and then propagating updates for our more complex projects.

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Hi @Eston_Melton,

I recognize Flowsana’s performance can be slow at times; it’s something I’m committed to improving - I would love to hear more detail from you about your experience, either in a Private Message here or via support@flowsana.net, if you’re willing. It would help in terms of product improvement!

Hi Guys,

I wanted to request the automatic updating of Project due dates. We now have some great tools such as dependency auto-adjust based on moving due dates, as well as @Phil_Seeman excellent tool Flowsana that fills some gaps where Asana’s native time adjustments are not complete.

I am just getting into Asana and as I look at these great tools and see how much benefit that could provide to my team as we try to execute on Product Plans, and have delays or otherwise have the actual Project Completion vary from the original Plan. However, I’ve noticed that the actual project dates do not move with these dynamic task date adjustments..

I think it would be great if the due date simply moved along as the last task’s due date moves with these various auto-scheduling tools. It seems funny that even though with Timeline you can move a project’s tasks with terrific automation, the overriding Project’s due date is stuck where it started.

Along with this we should have a simple display comparing this new due date to the original one, giving us a great Baseline view. This would be a great addition to the Project Progress screen, which is a major plus of Asana. This could also be reflected in Portfolios in the summary of Projects to provide a big fundamental of Project Management visible on these two screens!

If this is essentially something that belongs in this thread below, please go ahead and merge. I sifted through those posts and did not explicitly see a request to move the due date when tasks’ due dates move outside of that, so I thought I’d add a discreet request.

Thank you for the consideration!

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Happy Friday @OT160 and thank you for taking time to provide this thorough feedback and for taking the trouble to search through the current threads to avoid duplications! :smiley:

Hopefully this is something we can include in future updates! In the meantime, please don’t forget to cast your vote!

Please note I’ve slightly edited the title of this thread to better reflect your request and to make it more discoverable for other users in the Forum to support.

Thank you again for your feedback @OT160! Have a great day!

Hi again @OT160!

I just came across this thread: Auto-Populate a Project Date Range that I believe is similar to your feedback! If you agree I’ll merge your post with it to consolidate and reaffirm feedback!

Thank you! Looking forward to your reply!

@Natalia thank you for the responses, yes I think that thread does lay out most of what I’m thinking of, thanks for looking for it!

I think this whole stream will merge over there, so I just wanted to add that what I have in mind really here is something like this:

  • You set up a Project and add duration with start and due date (as a side, it might be interesting if you guys had this feature to just add duration and let the start and due date “self-determine” from the first task’s date)

  • As tasks move along, via dependency auto-scheduling, the Project’s end date starts to move. You should be able to see the growing difference on the Project Progress Panel.

  • When the project ends, the date of completion is marked. You could include on the Project Progress Panel the info about the “Planned End date” vs. “Actual End Date.”

With this info in mind, you could then roll this into Portfolios as well, ideally on a Progress Panel of their own that you guys could deliver, and you’d start to get a whole bunch of great data right in Asana.

I added some of this over on your “Leave Feedback” link in the Progress Panel as well.

And I also would like to reference the following post:

which is a very active one I highly support to, and is closely tied to this.

I apologize if this post is too long, but in my experience these details are useful to product teams!: So I wanted to post also that I am a user of Wrike, have looked at a lot of other similar tools with Gantt & dependencies. I closely analyzed Asana 2 years ago, but chose something else. Much of the research I read would refer to Asana as a “Task management” tool, and Wrike and others as more “Project Management.” I am back now largely because you guys have some terrific fundamentals with Timelines and Portfolios, and Project Progress, so you guys have come a long way towards being a true Project Management solution.

****One very small thing in Project Progress that is really great is your addition of the “subject line” when posting updates - practically eliminates need for Email or Slack!

I will keep a close eye on this and related posts, really hoping you guys continue to iterate quickly what you’ve already built on around Timelines/Project reporting functionality!

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Thank you for taking time to share this in the Forum @OT160! Your feedback are super important to us! :slight_smile:

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Hello again @Natalia, great to hear I’m glad it’s appreciated!

Last year Asana added the ability to change all project dates when setting up a new project from a template - great!
However, once a project exists it is still useful to be able to shift all project dates by a defined number of days, weeks or months. If all start and end dates move, then it does not need to handle interdependencies. Ideally, the project due date could be used as the reference point.
The biggest case is when the project due date changes in the first third of a project. It would be much faster to shift all the tasks and then correct the earlier ones.
Another case I just ran into was a project template that was more than 2 years old, so it is no longer possible to view the tasks in the timeline. If I could shift the whole project to the current year then I can review the tasks properly again.

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us @Matthew_Pritchard!

There is an existing thread regarding this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with it to consolidate feedback. Please don’t forget to cast your vote.

In the meantime I would encourage you to have a look at the integration Flowsana. You might find it useful!

Regarding the last point you have mentioned, I’m running some tests on my end to verify and understand the current behaviour and I’ll be back to you as soon as I have more clarity on this.

Thank you @Matthew_Pritchard! Have a nice Friday!

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Could you point me to the post?
Before I posted, I did all kinds of searches and could not find this topic, so maybe the header is non-obvious?

@Natalia, could you provide a link to the merged post, please? Thanks

Apologies @Matthew_Pritchard and thank you for flagging! I missed the merging steps!

This is the main thread I was referencing in my previous Post so feel free to upvote it! :slight_smile:

Hm, I am not sure this is the same issue at all. The original comment was about the date range shown in the Progress window, and one of the follow-ups was about tracking end date and due date in the Progress window. Both useful (necessary!) features but not the same.

I want to adjust the whole project by shifting every single date in the project (task start/end, milestones, due etc) by a defined amount (days, weeks, months). This should be simple because it avoids having to calculate and cascade any interdependencies between tasks (since they are all moving).

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@Natalia, you are mashing together several requests in this one thread. As I understand them, there are 3 different requests:

  1. Change the view window of the project on timeline and Progress chart by checking the earliest/latest tasks (user interface).
  2. Change every task date in the project by a defined number of days/weeks/months (admin function).
  3. Change project due date (maybe milestones?) based on changes to preceding tasks (user function).

Without pulling them apart, you can’t tell which of these is the most required. In my opinion (and that of this thread starter), number 1 is trivial and is really a bug in the current system. You should just get it done. It’s ridiculous to have a view window that does not show the project!