Managing task requests

Asana Community App Integrations
1

I would love to get input from the community on something I’m considering adding to my Flowsana integration - a way to manage the requesting/passing/assignment of tasks among people. Here’s how I’m thinking it would work, by way of an example (and with thanks to @Larry_Berger_lpb for helping with the design):

  1. As a prerequisite to this feature, Flowsana would create a new project called Task Requests.

  2. Mary has a task “Complaint from Customer XYZ”; it’s assigned to her. She wants to request that John perform the task. She types the following as a new comment on the task: “John, would you reply to this customer?”, then she adds the tag Task Request: John Smith.

  3. Flowsana is monitoring this project and sees the new tag. It creates a Follow-Up task in the Task Requests project and assigns it to John with the subject of TASK REQUEST: Complaint from Customer XYZ.

  4. John sees the Follow-Up task. To accept, he adds the tag Request Accepted; to decline, he adds the tag Request Declined. He can add the tag either to the Follow-up task or to the original task. (I’m thinking it’d be good to have this flexibility because sometimes, he won’t need to even look at the original task and can just accept right from the Follow-up; other times he’ll need to click through to the original task to review it and at that point it’d be easier for him to respond while he’s there on the original task.)

  5. If John selects Accept, Flowsana assigns the original task to him, removes the Task Request: John Smith and Request Accepted tags, and completes his Follow-Up task. It also creates a Follow-Up task for Mary in the Task Requests project, titled TASK REQUEST ACCEPTED: Complaint from Customer XYZ.

  6. If John selects Decline, Flowsana removes the Task Request: John Smith and Request Declined tags, completes his Follow-Up task, and creates a Follow-Up task for Mary in the Task Requests project, titled TASK REQUEST DECLINED: Complaint from Customer XYZ.

  7. If John accepted and thus was assigned the task, then when he marks it complete, Flowsana modifies Mary’s Follow-Up task by changing the title to TASK REQUEST COMPLETED: Complaint from Customer XYZ.

Notes:

  • This design allows Mary to add multiple Task Request: [username] tags to invite one of a set of people to accept the task.

  • I’m a little concerned about step 6: I’m not sure just changing the title of her Follow-up task is sufficient to alert Mary that John completed the task. Thoughts on this?

2

Holy Batman this is awesome Phil! This has been one of my big issues with Asana is there is no accountability process. I personally think the ‘Task request Complete’ (in capital letters) would be enough to know that it has been completed.

3

That looks awesome! Would love to see how it progresses!

4

That looks very cool. Maybe you need to have a prefix on the tags (like FS ou FA for Flowsana) to easily find the tag that would work as an action. And Flowsana should create a task somewhere hidden with the tags in it so that you never have to type the full tag every again. Does it make sense?

5

@Bastien_Siebman, a prefix might be a good idea, yes.

Oh I hadn’t realized that - you’re saying if a tag is present on a task, it will autocomplete when typed on other tasks, but if it’s not on any existing task, it won’t autocomplete?

6

Exactly. And since the tag you are expecting is quite complex, you need the autocomplete.

7

I LOVE this!! This is exactly what I have been looking for to implement into Asana. right now we just have an “accepted/rejected/needs discussion” but work tasks that take n hours is not factored at all. This would be amazing!