Adding my voice here. I am currently selecting a tool for our 20+ product management team in a 150+ R&D organization. I was happy when I saw Asana supported inter-project dependencies but disappointed after testing them. Without visibility on the roadmap on how this feature will be support I cannot commit to this tool. What we would need is:
The ability to enable a warning indicator when a dependency for a task has a due date later than the tasks’ start date OR due date
The ability to enable an automatic push out of the parent task start-date OR end-date based on its dependencies
The ability to enable a lock on “marking complete” on those tasks with open dependencies
If you have a roadmap for these features, would be great to hear about it.
Thanks,
Manuel
Asana doesn’t publish a public roadmap or comment on upcoming features; the reason is explained in this forum post.
My Flowsana integration can help with some of your needs. I do have a few questions about what you’ve written.
Flowsana can definitely do this.
Not exactly sure what you mean here. Can you provide an example to clarify?
I’m not 100% sure but I’m guessing what you’re wanting here is for Asana to prohibit a user from being able to mark a task complete if it has any uncompleted dependencies - is that correct?
What I mean is that instead of enabling automatic push out of parent task, the parent task simply shows a warning when it has a dependency which involves a conflict in timing. So it would be either automatic task adjustment or warning indication.
There are lots of aspects to task dependencies. Which aspect(s) are you looking for a solution for; or asked a little differently, what aspects don’t currently meet your expectations?
The aspect mentioned where if a task is checked as complete, then the next task that was dependent upon it moves into My Tasks.
+1, especially when it comes to the mobile app. Let’s use an analogy of preparing a bowl of cereal:
Get Bowl
Pour Cereal
Pour Milk
In Asana, I would make each task dependent upon the completion of the previous step. I should not have the ability to complete (or even see) “Pour Cereal” before “Get Bowl” is complete, and we are using Asana in an environment where we don’t need our employees to know what Steps 2 or 3 are before they complete Step 1 (Regardless of context)
Even the ability to toggle the functionality described above is integral to our use of Asana
I understand the web platform mitigates this somewhat, as I cannot complete tasks with unfinished prerequisites from list view, but it is still possible from viewing a single task. I’m less worried about this as I will likely be the only one using Asana short-term, but if we wish to expand the use of Asana to our other departments it could cause massive problems.
The mobile app is even more problematic, as no completion checks are made; just an easy-to-miss (for low level employees) reminder. This is a large problem for us as we are planning on deploying multiple employees within Asana that will exclusively use the mobile app. If an employee haphazardly completes a task before it’s dependencies are complete, they could kick off a chain reaction of events further down the line being marked as ready to start.
As it stands right now, it looks like I will be forced to sit down each morning and assign daily tasks to every employee, when I really just wanted to map out the whole year of production, make only tasks relevant in the moment appear, and adjust dates on an as-needed basis. If I map out my production year as is, my lower level employees will be inundated with dozens of tasks months out that have absolutely no bearing on the current day or week.
Dependencies actually being… dependent on completion of prerequisites is the main feature we were looking forward to implementing when we upgraded to Premium, and it is very worrying to us that this thread is almost three years old with seemingly little to no progress. I was strongly considering pitching the idea of a Business subscription to my higher-ups, but if this lack of attention is prevalent within the Premium version then what incentive do I have to further upgrade?
@Phil_Seeman has any further ground been made on this functionality?
I’m actually not an Asana employee, just an Asana user and third-party developer, and so don’t have any insights to share as to their future plans.
My Flowsana integration does have some functionality around not assigning dependent tasks to users until their dependency gets marked complete, but it doesn’t have anything that stops a dependent task from being marked complete before its dependency is completed.
Hey @Phil_Seeman, I suppose this is something that you would have limitations in developing as you’d need to restrict the ability to complete a task inside Asana? Seems like a great feature…
Has there been any progress on this? We are looking to (automatically) have subtask dependencies created. So that once one is completed, it fires off a notification for the next one, and adjusts dates, and so forth.
I have ALOT of tasks that are dependant on eachother. My team HATES that they see tasks they cannot work on, yet. Is there a feature that keeps tasks invisible until they are ready to be worked on?
It’s currently not possible to make dependant task visible only when you can start working on it. This is a popular request in the forum, I’ve gone ahead and merged your thread with the main request: Task Dependencies - the missing piece . I hope you don’t mind!
Thanks for your feedback! and I’ll make sure to update the main thread as soon as I have news about this feature.
Hello,
I am new to Asana, evaluating it as a PM tool. I noticed immediately that when I changed the date of the predecessor that the successor task does not move in accordance with that change? Essentially, if I believe my eyes and this forum, is it safe to conclude that as of today September 19, 2020, that Asana has no automatic scheduling capability? Laura
At the very least, you should be able to filter “my tasks” to exclude those tasks which have unresolved dependencies.
If Task B can’t be completed before Task A (… task B is dependent on task A), then including Task B in “My Tasks” is just noise.
Hi @Bastien_Siebman! It seems we have several requests related to Dependencies in one thread. I’ll review it soon so we can rename it or split it! If you can think of a name please let me know, thanks!
If you aren’t going to bother to make dependencies work in mobile, and it’s obvious by the years of requests by your users to do so that you aren’t going to bother, why do you even have it half-assed enabled? All it does it cause problems and frustrations for your end users. I was about to integrate asana into my company as I was pleased with the desktop version, but your mobile app is an unpolished trainwreck. I’m not about to take on the frustration of training my people in new software that the devs can’t be bothered to finish basic functionality on. You just lost my business, and that’s awesome for me because now I have to explain to my boss why we are switching again. Thanks assana you guys need to get it together.