Push project template updates to existing projects

Hi, Can you please consider adding the functionality of allowing you to push any changes made to a project template out across all projects created originally using this template? Cheers.

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Hi. This request already exists, @moderators will merge it. In my opinion this is way too complicated to do technically and to understand functionnaly.

Yeah this is a fairly complicated thing to achieve - the only tool I know of that does something like this is Scoro.

Clickupā€™s solution was to make it so you could create templates for projects, tasks, subtasks, checklists, folders, and workspaces individually.

I suppose if we had task templates that would be a big step toward reducing the time we spend working on work in a tool like Asana.

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For anyone interested, there are ā€œworkaroundsā€ for that need: šŸ”„ Hottest feature requests and their workarounds

If you have fresh ideas, please share there!

Is there a functionality where we can update 1 template, and anything copied from it auto-updates to mirror the original template?

Hi there,

Templates are live projects and can be edited at any time. However any changes will only follow to NEW projects made from the most recent version of the template from that point forward. When a new project is created from a template it is completely independent from that template, there is nothing linking them together so there is nothing to trigger any adjustments or retro-actively apply them to these existing independent projects.

As a possible workaround, you could somehow indicate which projects were created from a particular template perhaps within the project name itself (perhaps designating it with initials?) Then any time there is a change to the template, you could at least search for those projects and make the same changes to them. (You could also try using a tag or custom field.) Itā€™s not ideal and can be rather tedious especially if you have a lot of changes, or several affected projects. But itā€™s an idea. :woman_shrugging:t4:

P.S. I do love templates, they are super helpful tools and we use them fairly often. But yea, when stuff changes I just have to go into the other projects manually to make any necessary changes. Fortunately I donā€™t have a ton of them to do.

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HI @Paige_Corley :wave:t3:

We already have a thread on this topic, so Iā€™m merging your post with this existing thread to gather all feedback in one place!

If you have a project template, then use this to create loads of live projects (300+) and now you want to add a task template or new field to all previously create projects, you canā€™t do that.

Right now, if you update the project template and add the new task template, rule or field, this would only show in newly created projects, not old ones. It would be great if changes made to the original project template could push down to previous projects.

There is indeed a popular request on the forum to have updated made to templates retroactively be applied to projects.

For example Push project template updates to existing projects

@Rebecca_McGrath will be able to find the best one to merge your request into!

Take care Paul :muscle:

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Thanks for your feedback, @paulminors! Iā€™ve merged your post with an existing request we have in our #product-feedback category to consolidate feedback.

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Hi, Iā€™m having a template task challenge I hope someone can help with. When I update an existing task template, the other tasks made using this template donā€™t update automatically. This would be really useful!

Hi @anon90091581, welcome to the Asana Community Forum :wave:t2:

This is currently working as expected! Updating a template will not update any content made from that template.

Iā€™v gone ahead and moved this thread to the #productfeedback category to allow others to upvote your suggestion! :slight_smile:

Iā€™ll circle back on this thread should we have any updates in the future! Thanks for taking the time to provide your valuable feedback! :slight_smile:

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Thank you for template tasks! These are making my teamā€™s life easier already. However, the following would be a game-changing feature for us.

My team has 100s of projects in our pipeline at any given moment. Each internal project gets an Asana task with subtasks. Letā€™s say the projects are videos weā€™re creating. Each video goes through the same production steps ā€” scripting, recording, editing, and so on. Many of those steps require various approvals and hand-offs. We translate these needs into subtasks, with dependencies. Each phase (like editing) gets a subtask, and each approval or hand-off gets a milestone.

Setting this up once is fine. However, weā€™re constantly refining our processes, and thus the template. For example, say one of the approvals moves to later in the process, or we introduce a new format of video, which needs a different treatment. These all trigger changes to our template, which is like our master checklist.

At the moment, when we refine our process by updating the template, that helps only with new projects going forward. For those already in flight, we have to either manually update those subtasks to sync, or just remember in our brains to do that one extra step. Neither is a great option (especially the ā€œrememberingā€ one!).

I would love to have the option to modify a template task, and then have those changes propagate out to the already-created tasks . That is, any tasks that originated from the template could have those updates auto-applied.

In my example, if I have 20 video projects already in flight, and I edited the template to require a new approval step (or whatever!), Asana could prompt me: ā€œWould you like to sync the 20 existing tasks from this template with the changes you just made?ā€

This would be a killer feature for us. So much so that Iā€™ve researched lots of other Asana competitors and found only one that does something like it. (I understand why itā€™s not popular ā€” itā€™s probably hugely complex to implement!)

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This would definitely be great and is something I love when working in our other PM tool, ClickUp. Given Asanaā€™s slow development processā€”Iā€™ll check back on this in ā‰ˆ4 years.

This isnā€™t something that Asana currently offers. However, ClickUp does so perhaps Asana will be motivated to continue to iterate and make their features more robust and useful.

As a developer myself, I canā€™t wrap my head around how this could work with the current Asana model. I imagine many times where you donā€™t want changes to the template being applied to existing projects/tasks, and if changes were already made on the task/project, what is Asana supposed to do? :confused:

@Skyler I am really curious to understand how that feature works for other tools like Clickup.

You are being really hard on them :slight_smile:

@Scott_Murray,

FYI thereā€™s already a Product Feedback item for this request:

cc: @Forum-team

Thanks, Phil!

@Bastien_Siebman ā€” I agree, itā€™s a tricky problem, but I think it could be solved in a range of ways.

The simplest (and least flexible) would be to maintain a ā€œhardā€ linkage between templates and the descendant tasks. Soā€¦ if the template changes, the descendant tasks change, too. Letā€™s say the descendant tasks and subtasks maintain any values changes that have occurred since creation (like ā€œcompleted = yesā€) but the sequence of subtasks themselves is fixed and cannot be changed.

If you wanted to change those, that ā€œbreaksā€ the relationship, and the UI could warn you that future changes to the template would no longer be reflected here, etc.

Consider the analogy of PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides. You have ā€œmaster slidesā€ or slide templates, and any changes to those are immediately reflected in related slides. You can of course ā€œbreakā€ the relationship at any time.

An even simpler option would be to just warn the user, so we could manually do some tidying. E.g. ā€œyouā€™re about to save changes to a template. We see you have 50 tasks already generated from this template that are still not yet completed. Here, let me generate a list of those tasks for you so you can manually go check to see if they need to be updated.ā€

@Skyler thanks for the tip on ClickUp. I will check it out.

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