Introducing conditions and branching in rules

English Forum News Product Updates
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Hi Asana Community!

Hi, I’m Phil, an Asana Forum Leader, Solutions Partner, and Flowsana creator, here to share a big update to Asana’s rule builder! :drum:

Building and running processes across multiple projects and workflows can be quite challenging. But rules and automations can significantly improve the ways of working by minimizing the risk of manual errors and helping to deliver consistency in results.

Conditions & Branching will make it easier to automate workflows end-to-end across teams and tools.

With conditions, rules will now include an “if” statement. To briefly demonstrate, “when [trigger] happens, if [condition] is true, then [action] should happen.” With branching, a single rule can run multiple different actions, depending on whether or not certain conditions are met.

In the video below, I’m demonstrating the feature and walking you through a couple of use-cases.

You can also check out this guide article for more info.

With Asana, you can save time setting up advanced workflows and operate processes with greater speed, accuracy, and confidence. We’re so incredibly excited to see how you’ll use Conditions & Branching to supercharge your initiatives.

Please share your tips, tricks, and stories (or screenshots) below, we can’t wait to hear what you think!

Note: Starting today, this feature is available to 10% of users. In the next couple of days, we will ramp up to 50% of eligible users (Business + Enterprise) as part of a 6-week A/B test. We plan to make it available to all Business and Enterprise customers in early November. Stay tuned for updates!

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Hello Phil,
I hope you’re doing well. Can I request that my organisation’s Asana account gets added to the 50% initial roll-out for the rules? We’re currently working on a org-wide system that would benefit a lot from the update and it would also be a great opportunity for Asana to capture feedback as we do the build.
Best,
Mwikali

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Hi @anon38018025,

First, just to clarify, I’m a volunteer Forum Leader here and don’t work for Asana.

But more importantly, Asana doesn’t support enabling an A/B test on specific users; it’s just a random 50% sampling - sorry!

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Got it!
Thanks Phil.

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This feature is going to elevate our project management by 5x at least! Can’t wait for it to be released :partying_face:

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Another game-changing workflow feature! Gooo Asana!!! Thank you for the demo @Phil_Seeman. That was helpful.

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The new advanced rule builder has just become available on our instance, thanks team!

However, it seems like there is a maximum of 5 separate “if” branches (second column) for a given trigger? Is that correct? I know us users are always going to expect more, but 10 would be nice.

Our trigger is the change in a single select custom field, and it would be best practice to capture all the single select options selections in one rule (this particular single select has 7 options).

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Yes, that’s correct, there’s currently a limit of 5 branches.

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Our org was lucky enough to be in the early testing of this very needed and useful feature! Unfortunately, we aren’t able to add the new rule types to our existing project templates which we use frequently. :melting_face:

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Hmm, that’s odd, the new rule builder is supposed to be available in project templates but I see it’s not for me, either, at the moment. I suspect that’s temporary but @Marie or @Emily_Roman maybe you can check on this?

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Let me check in with our team :slight_smile:

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Hello @Milo_Fortin and @Phil_Seeman,

I got confirmation that project template and bundles aren’t supported at the moment (apologies for the confusion!). Both these updates are on our team’s radar and should be released as fast follows. We will keep you posted here once that’s the case :slight_smile:

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This is a great change, Phil. Thanks Asana for making it!

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Can you share any example use cases for using multiple triggers?

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Welcome, @Micah_Bozeman,

In My Tasks:

  • In section Later and unblocked

In a project:

  • Urgent is “Yes” and Team is “Marketing”

Hope that helps,

Larry

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I believe these are examples of multiple conditions (i.e., Check if…) versus multiple triggers (i.e., When…).

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Oh, sorry.

How about:

  • When Due date is changed or Due date is approaching
  • When Comment is added or Attachment is added

Thanks,

Larry

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I’ve been trying to recreate two of our classic rules using the new rule builder, but I keep running into issues. I’ve tried several different configurations, and the only one that seems to work is setting up six different rules. I’ve attached a pdf showing the two original rules as well as each of my attempts to recreate them in the new rules builder. Do you have any advice?

My aim is to accommodate different user behaviors on the Asana board by ensuring that no matter which field a user changes — whether it’s moving the task to a new section, updating the Task Status, or changing the “Ready to Assign?” field — the other fields will automatically update to maintain consistency.

Old vs New Asana Rule Builder.pdf (1.9 MB)

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Hi Phil,

When you say it will be rolled out to all customers in early November, will this include Premium customers?

Cheers,
Effie