I have been tasked with the following and my brain is in a muddle trying to figure it out. If anyone has any ideas or it is a glaringly obvious solution I would be extremely grateful.
The company has a strict training system with around 40 modules that need to be completed and refreshed at set intervals. They want to be able to see who has completed what, what is due to be done or refreshed and what has yet to be completed by each staff member.
In an ideal world I would like to have a project that has a list of staff paired against the modules with a “complete” “Due” “Incomplete” field clearly visible with a green/orange/red colour. Even more ideally to have it automatically tied to a dating system that I could perhaps input somewhere so that these fields do not have to manually changed.
I am aware each project has a limit of 20 custom fields so it could be split across a couple of projects.
I believe it will involve multi homing and setting up rules but I just cannot connect the dots quite right.
With a Business subscription, it is possible to create Complete, Due and Incomplete fields within a project and colour code these as needed. You can follow the steps here to create a field that will be reusable across your Organization I would suggest naming this field “Progress”.
You can then set up Rules to have these custom fields changed automatically depending on task actions! I’ve created some examples that might help:
Trigger: task added to this project > Action: Set “Progress” field to; Incomplete
Trigger: task marked complete > Action: Set “Progress” field to; Complete
Trigger: task is overdue > Action: Set “Progress” field to; Due
I have tried something similar to what you suggested however I think overall the amount of data visible in one project, when done like this, is a bit more limited than I would like.
I can’t see any way to tie two data sets together with this method - I need the staff member and the individual training modules almost as an X and Y axis if possible (or along the left and along the top) as I am basically trying to convert a spreadsheet to Asana to get this reporting accurate and nice looking.
I will have a play around with the rules set up you have suggested though and see if I can fit it to exactly what I need.
I have put into place your suggestions but run into an issue with repeating tasks. As the modules being measured by “Progress” have to be repeated I need the rules to continue to apply.
With the rules set as you have you presented when I have a task marked as complete it automatically changes the “Progress” field to Complete - so far so good - however when the task creates the new task to be repeated tomorrow the “Progress” field is still on Complete, when I would like it go back to Incomplete/Due.
I added that rule and unfortunately it did not work. When I mark the task as complete and a new task is created, due to the repeating nature of the task, the custom field in the new task remained as “complete”.
Hi @Phil_Seeman , I want to track about 20-25 employees.
What i have currently done is create each staff member as a project and created each training module as a task (40 or so) within those projects.
I have Due Date, Progress (Custom field with Incomplete, Due, Complete, Overdue) and Staff Member (same name as project but used when I multi home the tasks).
I then have ALL the tasks multi home into a overall tracking project. This means there is a lot of duplicate named tasks, from all the different staff members, but they are all in the same location labelled with the same custom fields and easily filtered.
Before we get to the rules which are troubling me - if there is a better way of doing the above I would love to hear it. Attached a quick look at what the overall project looks like and a staff project.
The issue I have with the rules is that I want the status to change from incomplete to complete when a task is marked complete in Asana. Which is fine - got that working. However as these are modules that need to be completed again I have them set up to repeat. The problem is that when it is marked as complete, the rule changes the custom field “progress” to “complete” (as I want it to) but when the new task is created for X amount of time in the future the custom field “progress” stays as “completed” when realistically I would like it changed Incomplete again until it is due.
I haven’t tried this myself, but what happens when you add the rule Rebecca suggested, “If New due date, then set Progress to Incomplete”? You’re saying that didn’t work? Does the rule not fire at all, or it fires but the Progress field doesn’t change?
EDIT:
Actually, wait - do you also have this rule in place that Rebecca mentioned?
Trigger : task added to this project > Action : Set “Progress” field to; Incomplete
Seems like that should reset the field on the new recurrence (since it’s technically a new task) but maybe the rule doesn’t fire for new recurrences?
I do have the Trigger : task added to this project > Action : Set “Progress” field to; Incomplete BUT it doesn’t fire so i dont think it works on recurrances.
However I seem to have just messed around and it is working as intended…
Hi Charlie.
Have you considered using the report feature in Asana?
I would take a look at this article regarding that by Bastien.
Maybe you can create reports which search for all the task with a particular module.
E.g. A report that shows all employees who have “Health and Safety Awareness” assigned to them. This way you can see whether who have completed that task or not.
Or if you want to see an overview of a particular person to see what tasks they completed, you can search for all the tasks assigned to that person in the project.
I would suggest naming this field “Progress”.
