Rules on multi-homed tasks not limited to their project.

This was a question in Tips and Tricks (here) that doesn’t have a working solution native in Asana. I think it’s even more relevant now that there’s a board view for My Tasks.

If a task is on multiple boards, it would be great to have it move to the ‘In Progress’ section on all boards, when it’s moved to ‘In Progress’ on one of them. There’s already an option to make a rule to add to a board section, but no rule to move to a board section, if it’s already on that board.

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Hi @Justine_D, thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback! :slight_smile:

As rules are Project based, it’s not currently possible for a trigger in one project to cause an action in another. However, I can understand how helpful this would be :slight_smile:

Hopefully this is something our Product team can implement in the future. I’ll keep you posted on any updates! :slight_smile:

Rules only affect the project where they are set.
If a task is multi-homed in multiple projects, rules won’t affect the task in other projects.
It would be useful if rules could affect also projects where the task is multi-homed.

Here is the scenario:

  • Two projects both have section Start and section End
  • A task is multi-homed in both projects, in section Start
  • When I move the task from section Start to End in one project, I’d like it to move sections in the other project, so that they stay in synch.

This would allow to consolidate multiple tasks lists into one consolidated view, providing visibility on tasks status (the section) of contributing projects.

A workaround here would be to use a single-select Phase custom field with Start and End values instead of using Sections. Sort (group) the projects by Phase in List View to achieve the same effect as Sections. (This workaround doesn’t apply to Board View.)

Then the rules to set the phases would work in multiple projects.

Hope that helps until/if Asana adds the requested feature.

Larry

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Thank you @lpb . Asana support suggested the same workaround.
While this workaround serves the purpose, experience is different: as you wrote, for example it won’t work with the board view.

So I believe my request for functionality still stands.

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Thanks for sharing your feedback with us, @anon2985182! We already have a thread on this topic s I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the initial request to centralize feedback. We will keep you posted once we have any updates.

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Our organization has started to get deep into using multi-homing of tasks to create consolidated visibility across projects. We noticed an issue today that when a task is moved from one section to another in a single project, the task (of course) does not move to that new section in the other project it is duplicated (multi-homed) to. So there is an incongruency between the two projects of which section the task is in. This sparked the idea of being able to duplicate not only tasks, but sections, in the effort to have tasks remain linked with regards to what section they are in. Said another way, when task is moved to another section in one project, it would also move to the new section in all projects it is multi-homed to (assuming the section exists in the multi-homed project).

@Sean_Olson,

I’ve moved your post in an existing thread requesting the same thing. Please see my suggested workaround above in case it might help until/if this becomes available.

Thanks,

Larry