I just discovered this behavior of Asana:
Say you have Task A. Then you have Task B as a dependent task of Task A.
When you mark Task A complete, Asana deletes the dependency between Task A and Task B!
This was a surprise to me, and seems like an odd behavior. Is this a bug, or it’s as designed?
I confirm the strange behaviour! If it is not a bug, I’ll be more than interested to find out the rationale behind!
I do not recall any project management tool where this is happening…
After some additional research, I’ve determined that at the underlying data level, the dependency info is not deleted. In fact one can confirm this by marking the completed dependency as incomplete again - when you do, all of the dependency information returns! So it seems the removal of the dependency info is purely at the user interface (visual) level.
We’ve been digging into dependencies and timeline view, and this behavior puts a slight cramp on things. (Asana could use some tightening up on follow-up tasks / dependent tasks for the UX)
Our problem is that the person assigned to Task B gets used to seeing and using the highlighted link to Task A at the very top of the task details. Once the prior task is completed, this link disappears. This disappearance could suggest that the task was deleted, completed, or the dependency was removed altogether. Hence, the criticism for improving the UX.
Workaround: for us, we trained the team to read the super fine print above comments and below projects, which is where you can find links to dependents / dependees.
Hi @Marie
I add that in the Timeline the dependency is always visible even after task A is validated. However, as @Phil_Seeman points out, the dependency info disappeared when I opened task B. Is this a desired behaviour on your part? Or will this be corrected?
Thank you
Thanks for bringing this up to my attention @Julien_RENAUD, I’ve gone ahead and filed a task for our team to find out wether this is a bug or an expected behaviour. I’ll be in touch as soon as I have more info!
definitely a need. Just like completed sub-tasks, dependencies are an integral part of the project. In my case i even transfer dependencies to another project very often. So it’s critical to be able to view what the project used to depend on. I like that they are listed above comments. They should really be listed more prominent. Just another section like subtasks.
In our use case, a clean hand-off process is really dependent on being able to click to the preceding task in the dependency to see details and access assets - even when the preceding task is marked as complete.
Does anyone know if this something that Asana is addressing or if there is a good workaround? I was thinking about putting the task link in the description, but we use template projects quite heavily so that won’t really work either.
Hi Marie, would you mind sharing the outcome of your inquiry?