I’m Alaa Almaktoum, and I’ve been using Asana for managing a team of over 50 people in my organization. We create hundreds of tasks monthly, and while the service is generally excellent, with a very good UI/UX, great reporting features, automation rules, and beneficial custom fields, I have encountered several critical issues that I believe need addressing.
Here’s how we’re using Asana:
Project: Represents the main project (contract)
Section: Represents the sub-projects or phases within that contract
Task: The individual tasks to achieve the sub-project
Subtasks: Any change requests or additional sub-tasks needed for any task
Problems:
Subtasks Not Shown in Workload View Subtasks are crucial for detailing changes under the main task. However, they do not appear in the Workload view, which is essential for my resource management. This limitation forces me to use a third-party tool to manage this aspect effectively.
Sections Not Included in Dashboards Sections are not reflected in Dashboards. For instance, I can’t generate a report on the number of tasks under a specific section, which significantly hampers my reporting capabilities.
Sections Not Shown in Workload View In the Workload view, you can only see the task name and project name. The section name is not displayed, requiring me to click on each task to determine which section it belongs to. This lack of visibility is inefficient and time-consuming.
Rules Cannot Be Applied Specifically to Subtasks I can’t apply Rules exclusively to subtasks. The current options are either tasks or tasks and subtasks, which limits the functionality I need for more nuanced automation.
Suggestions:
I believe Asana should reconsider its layering architecture to support all layers (Projects, Sections, Tasks, Subtasks) in Reporting features. This change would greatly enhance the usability and efficiency of the platform for large teams and complex project management.
Thank you for considering my feedback. I hope these suggestions will be taken into account to improve the service further.
Hi @Ala_Almaktoum , thanks for the feedback, which as @Bastien_Siebman suggests, indeed would be best split into separate threads which likely already exist.
However, to respond to your list of ‘Problems’:
In both Insights>Workload and Portfolio’s Workload subtasks can now be filtered to be displayed or not
Instead of using sections, you could use a single-select field that you could ‘Group by’ in our project. If the single-select field’s options are colour-coded, then you could use this field to colour your tasks in your Workload view.
You’re right but you could either multi-home your subtasks into a project that would treat them as parent tasks and therefore trigger rules for these. Or you could use the great 3rd-party tool, Flowsana.net.
#3 I have color-coded custom fields already but I don’t know how to view them inside Workload view. It shows in (Workload) under Portfolios, but I’m talking about (Workload) in Reporting.
#4
you could either multi-home your subtasks into a project that would treat them as parent tasks and therefore trigger rules for these.
Hi @Ala_Almaktoum , sure no problem! So, in response to your further questions…
The default is that the Workload will show both tasks & subtasks. If that is not what you want, then by applying the filter, will provide the below options:
I don’t think you are in a project’s dashboard tab, as I described above. You seem to be in a dashboard in Insights>Reporting, which is also known as ‘Universal Reporting’. You can still get ‘Section’ to appear as an option, ONLY if you select to Report on ‘Tasks’ and Include from ‘Specific projects’ and only select one project.
Thanks for the clarification. Indeed, there is no way to force a colouring option in Universal Workload, sorry. The colours are applied based on the project’s colour.
Go into a subtask and click Tab+P or from the ... select ‘Add to another project’. That project could have other fields and rules that would run on these subtasks. Your subtasks could also be added to such a project upon creation using a rule and the action ‘Create subtasks’ where you can define where these subtasks can also be added.
On the top of SubTasks (and if my post would be better as a new topic, please let me know), does anyone know of a way to modify how Asana displays SubTasks within List or Task detail views?
Currently, Asana will only show the first (20) SubTasks and then provide a ‘Load More Tasks’ link (or ‘Load Less Tasks’ if it is already expanded).
Q: are there any user preferences to set to ‘Always show all SubTasks’?
A: ???
Q: are there any user or other preferences to set to ‘Only show Incomplete SubTasks’?
A: ???
For example, a similar Asana Task feature, ‘Dependencies’ already behaves the way my second question is asking. Completed dependent Tasks are hidden in Task detail view by default, with a link to ‘Show Completed Dependencies’. Is there any way or workaround to get SubTasks to behave similarly?
