Best Way to Create a Large Project Without Using Templates

English Forum Ask the Community
1

I am trying to create a pretty in-depth project and need some help. When our company does expansions, 3 projects are used to manage those expansions. 1) A project with default tasks that get added every year. 2) A project for new markets. 3) A project for current market expansions. At the start of the year, we are told if we are implementing new markets, expanding in current markets, or both. I cannot wrap my head around the best way to manage this in Asana. Some things I’ve tried that have not worked:

  1. Project Templates: All of our dates are fixed and not relative so project templates haven’t worked as the project start date and due date can vary.
  2. Blocking/Blocked By: Dependencies are limited to 30, and we can have hundreds of tasks.
  3. Adding/Removing/Archiving: Removing a project from a portfolio (or archiving the project) won’t remove multi-homed tasks.

Maybe this just isn’t possible with how Asana is set up currently but I would love some feedback from the community on how you manage large projects with automations vs. manually adding each task to the project (even if it’s in bulk).

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Hi @Tracy_Hopewell1 , I moved this from English Forum > Product Feedback to English Forum > Ask the Community as it is more of a question than feedback to change Asana.

I think this is a bit much to dive into in the forum, but I’ll give you some high level pointers.

I don’t see that as an argument not to use templates. You don’t need to use relative dates.

That limitation persists with or without project templates. If you group the dependencies with tasks/milestones in between that could work as a workaround.

Main task/milestone blocked by Dependent group of tasks/milestones (up to 30) blocked by final dependent tasks (up to 30 per group)

Can you add some more context as to why you’d want this? If tasks are multi-homed it generally indicates that they are relevant for all the projects they are in. If that’s not the case the following procedure would be good to apply: Set “projects” visible in the list view to spot tasks that are multi-homed. (you can set this as a default view/tab in your template) Then when you remove or archive a project, use multi-select to “un-multi-home” the tasks.

General advice, don’t use automations in templates without using bundles. (Which requires at least Enterprise plan)

I have written some articles I think you might find valuable:

Hoping that helps.

JR