My name is Hannah and I’m a Product Marketer here at Asana. I’m so excited to share a new feature - variables in rules
We know it can be quite a challenge to connect all the phases and components of multiple different projects and initiatives, especially with a constant slew of updates. Rules and automations are essential in ensuring workflows and processes flow faster - saving time and improving accuracy so that you can focus on driving and measuring impact!
The new variables in rules will help drive more clarity, context and personalization across teams. You can dynamically pull in or reference values such as the name of the task, name of the task creator, and the name of the assignee (and more!) when adding a comment.
To briefly illustrate, automatically populate the comment text field with a friendly little reminder of the upcoming key dates, a status update, or additional context for the team.
With Asana, teams are able to save time and sharpen focus. We’re so incredibly excited to see how you use the new variables in rules to automate and supercharge your workflows.
Please share your tips, tricks, and stories (or screenshots) below!
Any thoughts on adding Custom Field values as well to this “dynamic text”? In addition, time delays to this automation would be great as well. For example, if staff need to update 3 or 4 custom fields and the custom message needs to include all those new values of those fields, it takes time to enter all of those at once before sending the automatic message.
This is great! Is it possible or will it be possible to also include a variable for subtask assignees?
My example is in the attached image: I’d like for the assignee to the main task to be auto-assigned to the newly created subtask that this rule adds. Right now, I also add a comment to ensure the assignee is getting that notification, but ideal would be for them to just be assigned to the task, without the additional comment.
My thoughts exactly! It would help with so much automation at my company.
We place our points of contact in different fields. I’d love to be able to have 1 rule that dynamically updates based on those fields so I don’t have to keep generating separate rules for each person.
Pretty please have rules for subtasks dates. I have missed several subtasks in My Tasks because They go to the ‘everything else’ section down the bottom of My Tasks.
Would be sooooo fab if I could set the same date rules I have already set for my Tasks for subtasks. ie Due today moves into the Today section and gets a priority of Most Important, Tomorrow and the next day gets moved to Tomorrow , days 3-5 are This week and 6-14 are Next Week.
Then I have an everything else section at the bottom that is a place holder until a rule triggers and moves it up the chain.
@Hannah_Lee , @Marie - This is very useful. Do you plan to add this functionality to the Zendesk integration action called “Add internal note to ticket”? Having the ability to include specific information from the ticket would be very useful. Currently, I want to pull in a release number field to provide the agent with all the necessary context to update the customer.
This is great. But a similar feature (that I’m surprised doesn’t exist yet) would be adding the CONTACT field as an option for the trigger update ASSIGNEE. Aka - if my rule is going to update the assignee it chooses the CONTACT field’s value.
As of now, if I want to set a rule for a task to be re-assigned to someone when triggered, I have to make a rule for every possible assignee. There has to be a work around.
My apologies! Correct, we created the custom field titled CONTACT using the field type People. We have 8 account managers.
Phil - I also utilize Flowsana (not sure if you’re associated, but I appreciate your work on this forum), but I don’t see a way to do this in Flowsana without having to create a rule for each Account Manager as well.
For example: We pass a single task back and forth using a task’s drop down custom field (we made) called ‘File Status’. So if the task’s File Status is switched to AWAITING APPROVAL then it ideally would assign to whomever the CONTACT for the task is. It would make sense since the CONTACT and ASSIGNEE are both People (member) values.
That is a small example of how we would use that kind of workflow. And this Asana release along with the PROJECT ROLES in templates is a step in that direction, but not quite where we need it yet. (not to say others won’t benefit.)
