The situation: Our client has a bundle with 400+ projects that helps control all workflow automations for their large-scale internal creative agency. The customer uses Portfolios to manage their projects (hint: potential Rule opportunity, if action can be “remove X bundle”).
The challenge: Every time they make changes to the bundle, it needs to update across 400+ projects, which results in lag/time delays.
The potential solution (requires Product Update to achieve, or seeking a workaround from the experts here)
When the projects are completed, the bundle is not longer required
The customer would like the functionality to automatically remove the bundle from a project when the project is marked complete / archived
Wants: ability to automatically remove a Bundle
Hoping the brainstrust here has a workaround, or seeking a Product Update
..but it’s different to your ask, because you seem to be looking for a specific rule action in Portfolios.
The other thread is asking for keeping the ‘structure’ of the project intact, leaving sections, rules, fields and task template in the project after the Bundle is removed. Is that an issue for your client? Would they not mind all that getting stripped out of the project when they want to archive it?
I’m also curious about the root case. Like project templates, Bundles usually aren’t something that you ‘tweak’ or update that often. Is it truly worth removing a bundle from a project, over waiting for it to update 400+ projects, once in a while?
Hey @Richard_Sather thanks for connecting! I love the Asana Partner ecosystem.
Thanks for sharing this forum post ! It’s a slightly different ask - this bundle is used to roll out Task Templates and Subtask Creator Rules onto projects (the custom fields are both in the bundle and in the project templates used to initiate the marketing campaign and other creative projects - let’s call it the “Automation Bundle”.
To answer your question about whether removing the structure would be an issue for the client:
Project sections are baked into the project templates (not the bundle) = they differ depending on the Project Template, but the ‘Automation Bundle’ is the same across project types
Custom Fields are baked into the project templates AND the bundle (so that we can trigger rules with fields)
Rules are housed in the Automation Bundle (so that we can drive subtasking based on the customers service catalogue).
As a result - once the project is completed, it doesn’t need to keep the ability to use the task templates or rules - and so we want to remove the bundle
To your comment about “bundles usually aren’t something that you ‘tweak’ or update that often” - Hmm, I agree in terms of reducing the frequency of updates, but at the same time, these bundles need to be scalable and adaptable. Especially as this customer is in a period of growth, they’re building out more offerings in their service catalogue, which will result in more subtask creation rules in the bundle.
I don’t see the problem to solve here as being the way we’ve set the bundles or project templates up, or the creative workflow itself - **its in the ability to remove the ‘automation’ bundle from projects as they get completed.
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I wonder if this would be a script action
Removing rules and task templates from a project (by removing a Bundle) is not considered destructive, since it will have no affect, but removing fields will, even if they are baked into the template. The fields will be removed from the project but their values will still remain on tasks (visible from the task details pane) but greyed out. Not sure if tyour customer will be happy with that side effect. To fix that, they would need to manually add the fields back into the project (or have another Bundle just for archived project?)
A custom script action could have been an option but I’m fairly certain that the API does not support Bundles, as it doesn’t support rules either.
A low cost solution would be to bake a task into the template, within the ‘closing’ stage of the project; perhaps this could be the last task that basically provides instructions on removing the bundle when archiving the project.
