Existing functionality: When [custom field - single select] changes from [value A] to [any other value], set date of Date Custom field [“Value A completed”] to 0 days in the future.
Reason for workflow: This is part of how I keep track of how long it took my team to move an investigation through each major stage. From Case opening > Case discovery > a decision is made > decision is delivered and case is closed.
Formula custom fields calculate the number of days between each stage. I wanted a dashboard view to see how we were performing at each part of our funnel. Honestly though I still have to export to Excel so I can do the fancier formula that removes weekends from the counts, but that’s a whole other story.
My struggle and feature request: I love that this rule trigger can capture the specific date that a stage changed. I’d love if it could also set the TIME that change occured. So my feature request is a change in the workflow designer, where you type “0 days” in the future to indicate that it’s today, being able to type “NOW” would capture the date+timestamp in its entirety at the time the rule fired.
My workaround right now is I’m having Asana auto-comment when the stage change rule fires, which captures a timestamp that I can then go back and add manually to the “Date the stage changed” custom field.
Good to see you here again, @Kristian_Sekse, and great request; I just voted.
Is there a chance you can use in a project dashboard the “Time in” option for the Y-axis specifying Average? This is available in Bar (not Stacked) and Line charts. So, imagine substituting a single-select Stage custom field for Priority in this example:
As I read, what came to mind was capturing the time (not just date) with an action to Create subtask (instead of Add comment which you are using and is quite similar) because it will put the date+time in the subtask Created-on field and generally might yield a more orderly and concise audit trail than comments for the phase completions.
@Phil_Seeman, is there any chance your Flowsana.net could then help Kristian to automate copying that subtask’s created-on date+time to the parent task?
@Richard_Sather, as Formula Czar, can you see any potential options we’re missing here?
I’m not familiar with the third-party Screenful product in detail, but it offers Track timings by segment and also a Dashboard Timing Screen. @SamiLinnanvuo, would those satisfy Kristian’s needs? Also, I saw Screenful lets you set a calendar to allow weekend handling; would that apply to these charts/dashboards?
Hi @lpb , I find several folks think formulas would come into use for such tracking, but they don’t, at least not yet! In fact, as you recommend, using charts in the project Dashboard, it is easy to report on time spent in a section, or a field, or to complete the task. This works great for SLA stats.
Being able to print the date and time to a date custom field when triggered by a rule would be incredibly useful. Given that the action in the activity has the date and time recorded there, the information should be available to the rule system too.
I didnt know about the ‘Time in’ option, so that comment is really useful @lpb. I’ve immediately added such a chart however being able to further break down the return of this with stacked bars would be very useful. This is something where recording the date and time of option changes has more versatility, especially when combined with formula fields.
