Hi all, I’ve been looking thru countless forums, videos, articles, and more but can’t get a clear path forward. I’m willing to invest in additional tools (if absolutely necessary). We are a business account. Here’s what I’ve got.
Our creative team needs to evolve our intake process for other brand teams to request/brief projects. I’d like to utilize forms and rules to provide a link to team members (ie, marketing, social, comms) that serves as creative kickoff. It is more or less built like this:
- Individual questions (long text answer) used to describe objectives, purpose, audience, etc
- date question for go-live date
- multiselect questions to checklist deliverables
- branches from multiselect to more multiselect answers to specify deliverables
- (ie: organic social > types of organic deliverables)
- Upload question for documents, inspiration, etc
A screenshot of my form is attached (its a work in progress). It shows some of the deliverable branches, but not all. Each deliverable only goes one branch deep.
This is what I want to happen:
- a team member fills out the form with high level creative information, and checks boxes for all deliverables required of the creative team
- the form creates a project out of each checked box in the multi-select deliverable questions
- each project is created from a base project template we create (ie: creative project design blueprint)
- The long-form answers and uploaded content populate the project info panel
- the project “go-live” is set by the answer on the form
- the project’s tasks dates are generated based a workback schedule from the go-live date
Here’s what I’ve tried:
- Using the form, I can only get one (1) task to generate based on the entire question field (multi-select) for deliverables. (not individual checkboxes)
- I’ve tried using a custom rule to convert tasks to new project (it shows its converted but not showing up as a new project).
Ultimately the hope is this: Every deliverable is a project, every project has a templated set of tasks. And every campaign is a portfolio we can track project progress. And submitting requests becomes as easy as ordering a sandwich. But right now, the volume of work we’re creating makes it difficult to centralize on asana.
Hi @Kevin_Knutson1
I do not believe this is possible using Asana’s native rule builder. You could perhaps do this using some fairly complex logic but my gut tells me that the native rule builder wouldn’t quite support this or I could be wrong and you just need to really think it through.
Perhaps having a single custom field to represent if a project has been created for each of your deliverables. Then a rule is run to create project for deliverable 1, which then updates the custom field to say the project has been created. Rule runs again when the custom field is updated and skips over any deliverables who’s custom field has already been marked as “Project created”. Eventually works its way through all of the selections and custom fields to create your projects.
What you described however is possible (perhaps more easily) using external options such as:
-
Zapier integrating Google Forms + Asana (You could use another form builder, just won’t work for Asana’s built-in forms with Zapier)
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Asana’s API, you would need to connect the end-points or webhooks and script things to generate what you described above based off some triggers.
Thanks Ludwig. Good start here. My expectations are that Asana probably can’t natively handle this. So very open to some additional integrations.
In the org, there is interest in using smartsheet as a potential intake form. I’m less familiar with that platform than google forms. But again, kind of striking out with the follow thru.
I’d check out if Zapier can work with Smartsheet (haven’t used it myself, but would be surprised if it isn’t supported)
Main thing to be cognizant of if you do use it is the amount of form entries you’d have per month and compare that to the paid plan you’d need as each entry would equal one Zap.
But I use Zapier for some much, much more complex processes and it handles it well enough between Asana and Google Forms, especially if you know how to script in Python.
Albeit in today’s age, if you have the time to spend, you can have ChatGPT or another AI model help you create the scripting with a bit of practice and trial/error if you’re at all familiar with some scripting.
I’ll look into Zapier, thanks for the lead. I’m not much a programmer. Another post on here lead me to make.com and that had a Chat-GPT source to look at how to program a solution. It seemed like it started to lay out some interesting solutions, but also a little outside of my wheelhouse. Hoping there could be something a little more… packaged?
Sadly, while Asana provides a lot of really great features. They don’t have a published road-map so we aren’t really able to guess when something along the lines of what you’re suggesting will exist.
Based on your level of experience, I’d really recommend Zapier then. You could get away with what you want using their drag/drop builder without doing any coding. It just might take you a day or so to figure it all out.
Let me know if you’re really struggling and I can try and point you in the right direction on the platform.
