As we all work across multiple teams, it would be great if a project could have a section that could connect to a request form. For example, an Event project template could have a Design section that has a request form linked to it. When the Event template is used, if someone wants to add a sub task for the design section of their project, it’s instead a request form so the design team can capture any and all necessary information for the task. It’s then created as a task in the Event project AND added to the design team’s project queue with all the necessary request fields.
This would be incredibly powerful and helpful for cross team collaboration. Right now, the automation tools and templating can only get you so far and it’s fairly time intensive to get it set up so it behaves slightly like this.
Hi @Laura_Barker ,
If I’m understanding correctly, your desired flow is:
- Instantiate project from template
- Have multiple forms on project, each of which “connects” to a specific section
- Have tasks created from forms get added to specific section of project and multi-homed to team-specific project
Is that accurate? If so, this is mostly accomplishable as-is:
- Create all your forms in your project template
- Create a rule(s) in that template that trigger when a task is added, check if it’s added by specific forms, and then moves the task to the correct section and adds it to the correct team project.
What you wouldn’t be able to do is force people to use the correct form (e.g. you can’t say: “This project is currently in x stage, only the one relevant form will be available”). To me, that’s a relatively minor issue, but not sure if that impacts your use case.
Desired flow is correct.
Your proposed plan wouldn’t be ideal though because the project manager would have to go to the specific project forms each time to add a task, like, create a social post or create a one sheet.
Realistically, they’re not going to do that and instead they’ll just add a task under that section, which we can use rules to direct it to the appropriate team’s task queue and assign it, but they won’t get all of the necessary fields or information they may need to complete the task which is the issue we’re running into today.
Again, we could make task templates for it, but we can’t enforce the requestor to actually fill out the details with the required information which is the other issue we’re running into. Yes, a lot of this is user error, but any way we can force the user to go through the specific process and share the specific information will help all of us.
@Laura_Barker - Ah, I see what you’re saying. I don’t know of a great way to enforce that level of discipline besides using a form (since Asana doesn’t prevent you from creating a task if certain conditions aren’t met the way something like Salesforce might prevent you from creating a record without mandatory fields being filled – that said, those processes are technically using web forms) or, as you suggested, using a task template and crossing fingers for correct usage/editing.
Teams that I’ve worked with have enforced form usage for data entry, and although the initial adoption was rocky, eventually that worked ok. I understand that might not be for everyone, though.
I guess one other option would be to run a rule that comments to remind people to fill out specific fields; that doesn’t feel like a particularly good option either and might cause more confusion than clarity.
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