Setting due dates for moving between sections

New Asana user here! Trying to prove it out to see if it’s a good fit for my organization. I’d love some feedback on whether this use case would work well in Asana or not.

We are a small animation company. We create videos for clients, and each job has the same schedule.

  1. Initial design call with client
  2. Deliver storyboard to client
  3. Deliver rough draft to client
  4. Deliver final draft to client

We do maybe 100 animations per year.

Currently I have one project called “Videos”. Within that project, I want to create a separate section for each step in our design process. A single task would represent an entire video. Once a storyboard is done, move that card to the rough draft section, then once that is done, move it to the final draft section, then once that is done, move it to a done section.

My hangup with this method is that due dates for each step in the process are really important to us. I would really like to be able to say, “The rough draft is due May 6, the final draft is due May 13”, etc. Is that possible to do? Ideally I would also be able to see on the calendar the things that are due on each day.

Right now I have solved the due date problem by not using sections at all and simply creating a new task for each step in the process. That way I can see all the tasks on the calendar at once. But the sections functionality seems like it could be really nice, as it would eliminate 3/4 of the tasks from my extremely messy calendar, and provide a way to see what is currently being worked on at what stage of the process.

Any ideas? This seems like it would be a very common use case.

Hello @anon19265707 .

Regardless of the solution you will adopt, I would say Asana can manage your process very well. I would identify two main ways of doing it:

1- One task - one video + only one project called “Videos” . That’s the approach you describe. I imagine it with sections (as the ones you mention), but also with subtasks (one per section, maybe generated automatically, if you have a Business+ plan). In this way you can represent each step of the video creation and smoothly create it dragging the “video task” from one section to another.

The subtasks won’t appear in the “Video” project calendar, but you can easily configure the process so that they all belong to a “backup calendar project”.

2- "One project = 1 video + 1 portfolio called “Video”. This solution brings your object one layer upward in Asana data model. It implies a less agile management of each video 8as you can’t drag and drop it through sections) but offers a better governance of the whole creation process of each video, as you would have all the tasks related to one video in one project and you will be able to enrich them with custom field values or mutual dependencies.

It would also provide you with a Videos portfolio (Business+ plans) to follow up the status of each video creation more in detail.

In this second solution, you would have a “Template Video Project” that will be used to create a new Video project whenever necessary.

I hope that helped. Please let me know if I can help further :smile:

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So am I correct in my understanding that there is no way to set due dates for when a task should be transferred from one section to another?

Yes @anon19265707 , you can. A rule can be set so that a section change can trigger a due date change. See screenshot below: