My team has a complicated workflow and I am needing to track how long partner approvals are taking. All partner approvals currently happen outside of Asana due to our org being single sign on and not enough licenses for everyone in our domain to have a seat.
What I’m needing is track the timing from completion of Send proof to partner to completion of Partner final approval.
I’ve tried many methods but with our due dates constantly changing, and the scope of our projects constantly changing, the most accurate way to report on this is going off of completion dates.
I know there are formula columns, but is there to create an output from a formula based on two different tasks?
Had the same dilemma with a client, and I thought of using zapier to push the data from asana into a google sheet log, and have your pivot there instead of having it natively via asana reporting.
Although it could work by combining asana rules with custom-field specific condition that only applies to approval (could be a custom task as well, it depends), where additional custom field as soon as the status of the ‘Send proof to partner’ was changed to in progress, it logs into another custom field with the date it was started, and as soon as it gets done, another asana rule is triggered to populate another date field of when the said task was completed.
This way you could use the native asana reporting, but this would extremely clutter your board, which again adds too much unnecessary noise.
The zapier way I was thinking is build a rule-based trigger in asana for those tasks (subtasks), where we’ll get the same trigger above, but instead of pushing the data back to asana, it gets pushed to a master data google sheet.
Hope this makes sense at all, not sure how others are doing it right now, but who knows, maybe the design of the asana workspace could use some help like optimization?
Thanks for taking time to reply. This sounds like it would work but my organization does not allow for any third-party integrations. We are unfortunately stuck with using Asana’s native capabilities
I was able to do something similar for tracking when we send files out to a printer and when we get the proofs back.
In our situation, we have an evergreen project with all assignments as tasks, and we change a Status custom field for each task based on the step of our process. When we set the task custom field status to Uploaded, a rule sets an “uploaded on” date field, and when we get the proof back, we change the custom field status to “Proofing” and a rule sets a “proof received” date field. Then, in turn, we use a formula field to calculate the response time.
I’ve also had luck in creating custom task types for individual subtasks like these, and then writing the date-setting rules based on when that custom task type is completed.
If you used @Leigh_Flynn’s approach of a custom field (or a custom task type), then in a Dashboard chart you could use Time > Time in custom field or Time > Time in status to get the sum or average time depicted:
@Leigh_Flynn Initial testing in a dummy project shows this working. I’ll have to test further but your input might have just saved me countless hours manually pulling ‘completed on’ dates!
@lpb This has worked on a project level, but I’m not seeing a way to add this as a chart in one of my Dashboards. I would love to be able to pull avg. time in each status for all these types of tasks throughout my organization. Is that possible?
I believe it would be possible, assuming you’re using a shared custom field or custom task type as I’ve mentioned.
I’ve found trial and error using dashboard charts is quick to iterate toward a solution, especially if you set up a couple of very simple test projects and tasks using the custom field/task type and then try to generate the kind of chart you need.
