I have a question that I have been trying to figure out on my own, and with some help from searching Asana Help - but have not been successful.
Does anyone have a #workflow that requires #multipleapprovals when a #form is submitted? Here is the scenario I am working with:
A staff member completes a form which includes selecting one of the 12 departments in our organization.
The form submission will then need a workflow that assigns an approval task to the selected department director,
Then the director approves and it is then assigned to the finance director for approval,
Then the finance director approves, and it is assigned to HR for approval.
Once HR approves, it is finalized and moved into “final and approved”.
So essentially (4) sections [department approval, finance approval, hr approval, and final/approved"]. But each of the 12 departments have different directors and they will need to approve first.
This should be easily done in Asana, it just takes a little bit of rule creation. I think the best way to approach this is using a mixture of a single select field to act as a custom status field and subtask creation that fires and assigns during certain statuses.
Set the default task type of your project to be Approvals.
Create 4 sections in your project:
Department Approval
Finance Approval
HR Approval
Approved
Create a custom single select field called “Approval Status” with the following options:
Department Approval
Finance Approval
HR Approval
Approved
Create your form, set it to place new tasks in Department Approval, create a rule in your project for when a task is submitted through the form, it automatically assigns the director of that department to the parent task. Create a branch in this rule for each separate department selection auto assigning each department director. Have each branch also change the “Approval Status” field to “Department Approval” for each one.
Create a rule so that when a task is approved, check if the Approval Status is “Department Approval” and if it is, then have it change the Approval Status to “Finance Approval”, and have it create an approval subtask that automatically assigns itself to the Finance Director.
Create another rule that says if all subtasks are marked as complete, check if the Approval Status is “Finance Approval”, have it change the Approval Status to “HR Approval”, and have it create an approval subtask that automatically assigns itself to the HR Director.
Create another rule that says if all subtasks are marked complete, check if the Approval Status is “HR Approval”, have it change the Approval Status to “Approved”.
Create another rule that says when the Approval Status is changed, check if the Approval stage is (Department Approval, Finance Approval, etc) and have it move the task to the appropriate matching section.
Since tasks complete when the task status is “Approved” on approval task types and you don’t like the way this looks, you can also change the rules and default settings a bit so that if the parent task is approved/completed during the Department Approvals process, that it uncompletes and changes to the regular task type so it doesn’t appear completed in your list view. I apologize if all of this was a bit confusing, haha.
I saw @Natasha_Falke’s question in Slack earlier and answered there briefly.
I recommended the same custom task type and statuses/stages and rule to assign the dept. director as @neonrain.club did here.
But I left out the rest of the approach to keep it simple. Whoever is authorized would move a single regular task to the next status/stage to indicate their approval, and that would be logged in the audit trail stories which could be checked as needed. It simplifies the solution quite a bit, if acceptable.
