Automatic creation of project from template

Hi everyone, I’m new to Asana and looking for some help. I’ve read through a lot of other threads and haven’t found the answer to my problem, but do acknowledge that I might have missed an existing article if one is out there.

I’m looking to automate the workflow of a repetitive process we use day in and day out. We are a construction company so all our jobs (once the bid is won) follow the same steps, I’m thinking these steps should be tasks, feel free to educate and correct me if that logic is wrong, and therefore was thinking to create a project template with the sections and tasks already laid out. From there I wanted our estimating software to automatically create a project from template (with Zapier) and then I wanted to have rules run to automatically assign tasks to people, set due dates and maybe do some other things. The problem I’m having is how to trigger the rules because it seems that I can only trigger off a task added to a project or a task moved to a section. With all the tasks already created in the template neither of these trigger rules to run…what am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for any help offered!!

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Hi @mgmt:

I am not familiar with Zapier, but understand the fundamentals. If you read through this article, it should answer your questions. It looks like you can trigger project creation from a “zap” through Zapier. Hope this helps!

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Hi @Mike_Tammaro

Thanks for the response and I looked through the guide. I am already familiar with, and have set up Zapier and Zaps, so I know the basic steps. What I’m struggling with is what I said, you can only trigger off a task added or moved to a section and that doesn’t happen with a project template that already has the tasks as part of the template. I’m hoping somebody out there has done something similar and can show me what I’m missing. Thanks!

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@mgmt,

Yes, this is something that has come up before (both with Asana rules and rules in our Flowsana integration) - rules trigger based on changes to tasks, but don’t run on initial project creation.

There’s currently no real solution for this that I know of. I think the solution would probably be to have a “Run Rules Now” capability, which has been suggested and which you can upvote here:

In addition to what @Phil_Seeman said, this may be a limitation to the new project templates that rolled out a couple months ago. Not sure if this capability was allowed in the old project templates.

Nope, not available there, either - it’s never been possible to run rules on a newly-created project that was created from a template which has rules in it.

Got it, thanks for the clarification Phil

Hello @mgmt,

It looks to me that your approach to having tasks in a project template is correct.

Just to understand your workflow, may I ask why you do not in the Asana Project Template pre-assign the tasks to the right people and set relative due dates? You would not need to trigger any rule for that, but I presume that has something to do with the estimation done by your third-party software, so the assignment should happen after the project goes through your estimation software?

Cheers,
Rosario

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