Progress fails to sum up subtasks

We are an SF startup hacking asana to accomplish agile development of APIs & Apps with our small teams. We use multiple projects to handle different parts of the development process and to manage sprints. We make extensive use of subtasks, even though they are poorly done and hard to use in Asana. We are missing some very standard agile fields like points on the free version of the project but get along without it. But project progress on a sprint would be useful, and it just doesn’t work right, as it fails to sum up the subtasks that are part of a project and credit us with accomplishing them. Are we doing something wrong, or is it just simply borken?

3 Likes

Agree with Jeff with a somewhat different viewpoint - the Dashboard and resulting emailed reports do not include subtasks in the “task completed” count. This can be a pretty important metric, because Projects that heavily utilize subtasks get the wrong impression of workload, relative to ones that do not.

A potential fix is to not use subtasks and break everything into Projects, but without sub-Projects you have to manually collect all relevant Projects and add up the task counts.

User story here - we have all of our existing project support in one Project. It is important to keep track of how much work is there, because it affect the management decisions about resource allocation. So frequently tasks that could be Projects grow to 50 or more subtasks, all not accounted for in the reports.

Example, “Existing Project Support”:
Dashboard reports: 156 completed, 59 remaining
Actual (CSV export): 449 completed, 142 remaining

5 Likes

I agree this is a big gap in the service. I will take it 1 step further and express a want to be able to easily tag sub-tasks. You can only after clicking into the sub-task detail screen, but even then, once you go back to the task-level, you don’t see the sub-task’s label visually.

Would appreciate the update.

6 Likes

I agree with John and Jeff. The subtask are almost worthless. There is no progress bar or counter on the main task, see my screenshot of a competitor. The dashboard does not tally up the progress of the subtask so it looks like I have not accomplished anything to my project manager.

And unless I’m missing something, I have no way of telling if there are subtask without opening up the main task to see if there are any subtask I should be worried about.

Just tried to upload a screenshot I mentioned above. But because I’m a new user I’m not allowed to. :frowning:

8 Likes

Plus 1 for including subtasks in the Dashboard overview. I’m transitioning a company of 25 ppl to Asana and want to be able to build out projects in subtasks to keep the overviews in the main tasks minimal but am reconsidering because they’re not included.
:frowning:

4 Likes

Just adding support for the request because I believe it will add tremendous value to the platform from a reporting standpoint. Just need an option to include sub-tasks on the progress report, exactly like the ability to include sections. That being said, creating ‘sections’ almost entirely solves the problem for me in the case study below.

I’m working with a construction company on project management. Small company, three people, 10-12 active projects at a time. With sections, I can create the top level phase we need, such as Planning, Construction, Punch-List, etc. and still have task capability on that phase to mark it complete or add notes. Then, I can put the tasks for each phase as a top level task. This effectively backs up my top level task into the section heading and moves my sub-tasks into the top level, where they are now being counted in the progress report.

It clutters up the project board in some ways because now there’s a huge list of tasks at the top level, but with the improved progress reporting to break out sections and even remove them from the chart, I can at least see the daily work being completed and get a visual representation of how tight things are against our deadlines.

Hopefully that helps someone else, but I can see how it’s not ideal for existing teams because it’s forcing process and workflow changes that may not be best for the business. If we’re going to be able to create sub-tasks into infinity we should be able to report on that data.

3 Likes

I am adding my support for this as well. We are running a series of complex project and subtasks is a great feature for pulling together things like document reviews where you need 5 people to review and comment to complete the review task. We want to be able to track those metrics on the progress chart otherwise the effort across all our subtasks is missing.

At present we cannot use the Progress to reflect project status so we do not use the charts. Maybe an option to include tasks or tasks and subtasks and leave it up to users to decide.

3 Likes

Same problem as the above. Our department is small and we each use Asana to manage several projects and we’ve been finding lots of practical benefits using subtasks. The problem is, I accomplished four subtasks this weekend and my manager won’t know any of that from looking at the progress for that project.

Is there a reason why this isn’t an option? Can we discuss making a change?

2 Likes

+1 for this request.

2 Likes

seriously? so subtask progress tracking just isn’t part of the system? that’s where the power of tracking meets the road. it’s like counting calories, but not counting the sauces you eat. when after a month of calorie counting your realize majority of your calories come from sauces! These kind of insights are what change strategies. So the tracking is useless if it’s not accurate. And that was the main reason I was using a system like asana. So i should just do what? Create my own google sheets tracking system? Do they intent on fixing this? or care?

2 Likes

I feel your pain. There are more serious tools that do this eg Jira. But
I’m still using Asana for a small dev team and we just live without it.
I’ve developed a feel for the work we ca do or not though having numbers
for the work we do would be helpful.
It’s free after all… Once we get bigger we’ll move to something else…
Cheers!

  • jeff
1 Like

How about the option to “include sub-tasks in dashboard calculations” somewhere?

  • Or perhaps a per dashboard widget option/checkmark to “include subtasks in calculation”

It’s odd looking at a project with six tasks to be resolved, when I know it in fact has 100~ or so…

Something, some way, some how to include sub-tasks to really know if we’re on track or not would be useful…

2 Likes

Very disappointing to find after we upgraded for more reporting features that we can’t a progress report on subtasks. I’m glad there’s an option to tag your subtasks to your project, then create sections, and report on the sections, but this is messy and I’d have to add every subtask of a subtask of a subtask to this list which is ridiculous and doubles+ my workload. Hopefully this is being developed!

2 Likes

I am in agreement that there needs to be at least the option (if not by default) to include subtasks in your reports. The majority of the target clients for the premium level features are going to want reporting, and the benefit of utilizing subtasks for levels of organization is reduced when that can’t be included in the progress and reports.

I would love to hear a status update of if and when this feature could be included in an update.

3 Likes

As far as I know, Asana doesn’t support this kind of reporting on subtasks, but you could use Velocity (which integrates tightly with Asana and has a free trial) to create a wide variety of reports/charts on subtasks. Velocity has a BI-like reporting interface that lets you create reports on Asana tasks, subtasks, or tasks + subtasks and configure a large variety of custom filters and dimensions. Tracking project progress using subtasks is a very common use case for our users (disclosure: I’m a cofounder of Velocity).

Here’s a screenshot of what this could look like in Velocity:

1 Like

I’m wanting just an overall progress percentage for all of the tasks and subtasks of a project. Is there a specific report that Velocity has that can do that?

@Ashley_Kay A percentage report isn’t supported yet in Velocity (we’re considering building it, though), but it’s easy to chart the number of open tasks and subtasks vs. the number of closed tasks and subtasks by using “X-axis: Open or Completed” in the chart builder. Here’s an example that does this for a specific project (“My Project”):

1 Like

+1 on support for this. Our software firm has many individual tasks that are not big enough to merit individual tasks, but important to track pace.

You can track and monitor your project tasks and sub-task with Fizure.
You can choose how to see the commitment by the amount of unit or by % as you wished for. It gives an overall progress pecentage for all of the tasks and subtasks of a project.

More information from here:
Budget tracking and job cost tracking software