We’re at a bit of a quandary with how to use Asana for our manufacturing Jobs. Do we use “Tasks”, or "Projects’? These jobs are exceptionally complex, they pass through about 50 phases of development (from sales to install), and frequently take over a year to complete.
We currently use “Tasks” for Jobs, but are finding that some features available to “Projects” are becoming necessary. But, if we do that, we lose several of the features of “Tasks”, and the whole thing ends up being a wash. I’m not a rookie user, we’ve been on Asana for 5 years now, so I know the ropes, but I feel like I’m missing something. At the price point we’re paying for the Business level, I feel like these things I’m missing shouldn’t be missing.
Using “TASK” for Jobs–
I don’t get a Timeline/Calendar view for the Subtasks in the Job. I need to be able to see all the Subtasks (and sub-subtasks) within the Parent Task so that I can effectively drag/drop the task due dates as situations change.
Custom Fields are messy and not collapsible. We LOVE Custom fields, and we use about 15 of them on each Job (Task), but they aren’t collapsible, and cannot be moved to the “bottom” of the project. They really make a cluttered mess out of a complex project.
Using “PROJECTS” for Jobs:
Project Name doesn’t show up on any Calendar or Timeline view of all the tasks within that project. This is a huge problem when you use secondary Projects in Asana as calendars. We have a Project for “Install”, and when you open the Install Project calendar (or timeline), all you see is a bunch of tasks that say “Deliver” and “Install”. Those tasks are automatically created by the project template. Surely there’s a way to get the job name (Project Name) included on the task on Calendar views without us manually editing all those tasks to paste in the job name.
I don’t have a way of tracking a Project’s progress through the phases of development. Our jobs move in a linear fashion from one phase of development to the next. We can simulate this on Asana if jobs are ‘tasks’ and we use Board View task Sections to represent the phases. We just move it from one section to another. If we use Projects for jobs, I don’t know how to get this.
I understand that there are third-party services available to help with some of these sorts of things, like Zapier, Flowsana, etc, and I have no bias against them. But these are things that seem to me that Asana should natively be able to do. And, I’m trying so very, very hard to avoid complicated setups, and bringing in third-party services just adds another layer of complexity to something that someone is going to have to manage.
Well, being honest, we’ve made efforts to find software that does what we need it to.
In the meantime, here are the workarounds we’ve had to implement.
We still cannot get a Timeline view of the subtasks within a Parent Task, so we are forced to multi-home all the subtasks into a project so that we can see a Timeline view.
We still cannot get the Project Name to show up in any of the tasks that are created when the Project Template is launched. This means that every Project that gets created from the Template will have to have someone manually paste the job name (ie, the Project Name) into the title, so that the task titles make sense when they are multi-homed in other projects, especially in Calendar view. This is highly irritating to have to do, but we have to do it. This has forced us to use a simplified version of the processes needed but this is less than ideal.
Custom fields are just messy and they still aren’t collapsible, there’s no workaround (especially on the mobile app) so you just have to scroll through all of it, and when it comes time to onboard a new team member, they ALL always get lost in those fields because it makes the task visually a mess since you cannot collapse them.
We still don’t have a way of tracking a Project’s progress, although admittedly I think projects have some custom field options that I haven’t fully explored. We have a few toggle options like “at risk” or “on schedule” or “off schedule” but those are not useful at all for us.
Yes, I’ve seen this rule recently. I am not sure when it was added but certainly wasn’t available at the time I made the first post. So, at least they’ve made some good improvements in that regard.
Unfortunately I have MOUNTAIN of projects now that I would need to manually set this rule on, rather than updating all the projects in the team (or, even better, use a radio button to select which projects I want to add the rule to, from the team-level).
I can build this rule into the template but it won’t carry over on already-made projects.
