Hello, we have tried to get in tough with Asana to get some advice but haven’t had any luck. Hoping someone here can help.
We are new to Asana and recently created a ‘global marketing roadmap’ as a project within Asana. It includes four key sections, and corresponding tasks & subtasks. The problem we have is that some tasks can have up to 5 levels of subtasks. While this kind of granularity is required, we lose the bigger picture. Has anyone found a solution which allows them to do both? High-level overview & granular detail?
Hi,
For a free account, the Community is the best place to ask questions.
My feeling is that 5 levels of subtasks is way too much, not surprised you are loosing track of the bigger picture. Subtasks are not really made for this kind of encapsulation from my point of view. I would advise to have only one level of subtasks, never more. Why do you need so many?
Bastien
Asana Certified Pro, consultant, author and developer
1 Like
We have a premium account, not sure if that has an impact though.
We’re dealing with (sometimes) complex mini-projects within the project which results in so many sub-tasks. It is also important we account for each component and can (where necessary) assign it to a team member. I have included an example below:
Marketing roadmap (Project) → Corporate comms (Section) → Announcement (task) → Press Release (subtask) → Draft (sub-sub task) → Approval (sub-sub task) → Distribution (sub-sub task)
Is there a structural change you can suggest which might help us to avoid this, while retaining the info?
@Keeley_Reynolds, because of the limitations of subtasks promoting subtasks to tasks may work better. I simply indent to create a more outlined view in this situation. So mine would look like:
Corporate Comms
- Announcement
1a Press Release
1b Draft
1c Approval
1d Distribution
Using Timeline and marking tasks dependent on others may help with your overall vision. Have you explored Timeline?
1 Like
have you thought about using custom fields to better organize the type of tasks? for example: have only a single task ‘announcement’ and then use a custom field to specify the different types of announcements (e.g. press release, email blast, etc). then, have another custom field for status (not started; in progress; for review; approved) … once it hits approved, you know all thats left is distribution which can simply be the activity that triggers the task to be marked complete.
one of the benefits of not even having a subtask is you can see the full status and comment thread the whole way through without diving in and out of layers. and can even set your custom tag colors so that you can easily view types of activities or status of activities on timeline via color sorting.
another benefit of not using subtasks is that you can save the use of subtasks for one-off tasks that are unique to the particular task. (e.g. lock down quote from client x, check on timelines with PR agency, etc).
5 Likes
The only problem I’ve had with depending on custom fields to differentiate the tasks in that way, is that when viewing in My Tasks - the custom fields don’t display. So there might be three tasks that say “announcement” with no context of what separates them without having to click into the task and/or project. For newbies on my team, they found this very confusing. They needed to have a firmer grasp on Asana and project management before we could start depending on custom fields in that way. And for users who don’t have access to custom fields, they’d have to depend on tags or naming conventions.
But if everyone on your team has a premium account and great grasp on the system, I agree, custom fields may be the way to go.
Isn’t it the team that has premium features and not the user?
Agree for those outside your direct working team for which you would not want to eat licensing, custom fiends would obscure status… but how many ppl need that level or granularity on a frequent on-demand basis?