Maintaining several templates, which contain duplicate tasks and sections?

[Jonas_Grandt_Bindsle]

Hello Asana Forum,

I was not able to find an existing topic regarding this, so I will make a new topic But please direct me to a similar topic if one exists. I hope this is the right way to learn more about how we can most effectively use Asana. I work at an IT company with a lot of enterprise customers, and we use Asana for managing our projects, which can vary quite a bit in task scope. We have Asana Business currently.

We have one big template with hundreds of tasks, divided into about 15 sections, which covers a few of our most common project types. The reason for this is mainly to avoid having several templates with duplicate tasks to maintain.

Some projects require us to go through all 15 sections (fx, new customer who needs a full check-up), while other projects only need 3 out of 15 (fx configuring a couple of new servers), and another project might need a differnet set of sections (fx set up a new Microsoft 365 tenant). This means we have to manually “trim” each project after creation, deleting unneeded tasks and sections, to fit the task scope for that specific project.

Is there a more efficient way of doing this? For example:

• pick and choose sections during project creation?
• “synchronize” sections or tasks across several project templates, allowing us to have more than one template?
• A form or questionnaire, “is this project type a, b or c” that then trims the project for you?

[Danielle-GenD]

Hi @Jonas_Grandt_Bindsle welcome to the forum.

You could make separate templates for each type of project and depending on form selections make a rule to bring a particular template in based off of those.

[lpb]

If I understand @Danielle-GenD’s post, you could specify in the rule actions to add tasks/subtasks/metadata to mimic what was in your project template if that’s what “separate templates” is referring to.

But that would either allow you to add or remove sections, so you’re still left with that.

What I sometimes do is use a single-select “Template type” custom field in the template to specify different cases to enable the one-time setup to proceed more quickly by sorting by that field (not within sections) then multi-selecting contiguous tasks to delete all at once. You still have to delete empty sections then. And then delete the no-longer-needed custom field before sharing the project.

Thanks,

Larry