Hey there:
I run an editorial calendar in Asana. We have several custom fields set to define our publishing workflow and tether the editorial board to creative and social boards too.
Having run into several issues and clunky processes, I finally found a way to streamline the process — but it’s somewhat delicate and prone to user error.
IF Asana made a change, it’d make the platform and the “Variable” functionality more durable.
Here’s the idea:
Goal:
I wanted to link work on the editorial board to the social board, notifying our social manager when a blog is set to publish, so she can prepare in advance and be ready once it goes live. She has her own in-take form for the social board and often requests design work from the creative team to make branded social images for the blogs.
Rule:
I set a rule in Asana so trigger off a custom field. The custom field is a single select that offers two choices: Yes or no. If yes, the rule triggers and creates a new subtask that’s added to the social board and pulls in existing custom fields from the editorial board, using the variable functionality. However, those variables only pull in material that’s populated in those custom fields at the time the rule has been triggered. So, if they’re left blank, the social team has to manually go back into the parent task to find information. This is where the workflow is prone to human error and breakage.
Solution:
Make the variable functionality dynamic, meaning that at any point a person can go into the parent task to update fields and the changes would show on the other side — in this case, changes in the editorial parent tasks would show in the social subtasks.
That, and to better organize the dynamic fields, you should be able to move them around wherever in the description and allow them to be organized in tables. This would help organize the briefs more neatly and improve the UX of the variable functionality.