Sharing Sections with external teams - Looking for advice

Use case:

I have a number of Projects I manage each each which have a number of tasks that need to be completed by the Client.

I have created Project templates that organize the tasks into Sections, based on the type of work required for the task (i.e marketing resources, internal development, etc.) I have created a Section for “External Client Work” that includes all tasks owned by the Client. Within each task is a number of subtasks (i.e Promotional material task includes 10 possible subtasks for client produced resources)

I am looking to share and give full visibility of the entire External Client work Section to the client’s team.

I am currently adding Clients as Collaborators on a single task, then create an Action that “Adds collaborator to tasks when it enters a Section”, then move all all other tasks out of the Section and back in to trigger the action.

This is painful to repeat each time for each task and has a very annoying side effect…

The external collaborators are only able to see the tasks under “My Task” view, They see all tasks individually (subtasks appear inline with standard tasks) and their project managers cannot get a quick overview of all the work their team is required to do.

Is there anyone that has feedback, suggestions or best practices with working with external teams and have you managed to make this more seamless?

My ideal solution would be the ability have Sections “Sharable” so you can add collaborators to a Section which gives them full visibility into all tasks within that Section in the same way I see them (Section > Tasks> subtasks, etc)

Usually what we do in your case is create a separate “public” project for the client, and multi-home into that client only the task they have the right to see. That could include their tasks as well as milestones. And then you invite the client as a member of the public project, not the private one.

Would that work in your case?

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I’d have to try it out with one of our existing clients.

My main concern here is getting into Project bloat with each “Project” now requiring two separate projects in order to function.

Has anyone come up agains this collaboration struggle in the past?
Is there a feature request to make Sections more sharable (I cannot find anything to this effect in my searching)

I really don’t see any other easy solution. And I don’t really believe Asana would allow such an action to be added to sections objects any time soon…

@Bastien_Siebman Is it not something that they’d allow because no one has this workflow or is it a product deficiency they know about but doesn’t have enough market to go after?

I’m trying to get a sense of if I am managing this incorrectly/ inefficiently or if Asana may not cater to this type of project - A large set of the project’s tasks are owned by an external team needing their own oversight into those tasks.

My personal guess is that it would complexify the product too much. Asana is not doing everything people ask, they pick what matches their vision, without bringing too much complexity to the table.

Your use case is very common, needing to share part of the project with a client. And the solution has always been the same: multi-home what you need into a public project.