Ongoing Process Workflow design: One task through stages vs. subtask automation

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What pattern do you use for sequential multi-person workflows? What breaks its scale? When am I getting “too fancy?”

Scenario: Multi-stage approval/fulfillment process. Classic “Ongoing process” workflow.

  • Each work item (e.g., order) passes through 5–6 people sequentially.
  • Each person has 3–15 discrete steps to complete at their stage.
  • The steps are always the same.

Design questions:

  1. Do you auto-create subtasks for each person’s steps, or do they follow a documented procedure without Asana subtasks

    • Trade-off: Structure and specificity vs. task clutter

  2. How do you trigger stage transitions?

    • Manual: Person moves parent task to next section → Rules handle reassigning

    • Auto: Rule triggers when parent task complete → creates new parent (with subtasks) in next section

    • Hybrid: Person changes a custom field → rule moves it

  3. Alternative pattern: Chain tasks instead of moving one task

    • When Stage A task completes → rule creates Stage B task (with template/subtasks)

    • Parent task stays in Stage A as record

    • Pro: Clean separation, achievable automation. Con: Harder to see full item history. Also just overdesigning and complicated?

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@Liohn_Sherer,

These are great questions/topics. However, I feel they are better suited to an interactive discussion than to an async Forum thread. But since that’s all we have here, I’ll try to respond where possible, which is limited because…everything depends!

  1. Re procedure in Description vs. subtasks: As the person/team wishes. If the number of subtasks seems overwhelming, consolidate them into fewer. If multiple stages/people/subtasks, it’s usually a good idea to preface each subtask grouping with a Subtask Section (Separator) to nicely group them.
  2. Kind of your Hybrid option is my preference, but 1) on parent task only (all subtasks hang off it), and 2) use Custom Task Types (so no rule for “moving” is required) for the stages instead of a single select custom field, so long as none of the caveats with CTTs preclude their use for this workflow, now or as it may morph in the future. Custom Task Types simplify things, but there could be dead ends in just a few cases, e.g., no Advanced Search for CTTs now.
  3. As mentioned in (2), I prefer (usually; depends!) one task to group the work (and allow drill down to subtasks) and show the stage the work is in (as opposed to the work of one order, say, split into six tasks all about the same order if the workflow has six stages.

What do you think?

Thanks,

Larry

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Is that an invitation?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think my first instinct - to build out a complete, hypercomplex workflow where subtask completion trigger new parent tasks at the next stage - is an Asana version of micromanaging. It’d be fun for me to build and terrible for users to follow.

I love that you’re leaning towards CTT instead of sections. TBH I’m surprised the Asana training and guidance hasn’t caught up to this yet and is still showing sections as the default workflow for ongoing processes.

I’d love to hear from others.

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