Tracking how often a due date has changed on a task

[Ariadne_Aquino]

I want to keep track of how many times employees change the Due Date of their tasks. This way, I can have an overview of the postponements and delays in projects.

I created a custom text field called ‘Postponements,’ but it can only flag that there was a change in the due date, not sum all changes.

Considering the number of projects, tasks, and employees I monitor, I would like to automate this counting and make the total available in a report. Is that possible?

[Bastien_Siebman]

We stumbled upon this topic many times with clients and didn’t really found a way. You could create a subtask every time, but the user can remove them. So at the moment, based on my experience, you can easily both track and ensure the user can’t change it…

Actually one way: post a comment, which won’t be removable. Or create another task hidden somewhere, but both of those options are hard to consolidate…

May I ask why you need to track? can we go back to the root cause? Is this a trust topic?

[Hasan-Ijaz]

I can share my use case here:
I want to be able to identify the type of tasks where the due date keeps getting modified and figure out how to optimize it.
It would help people evaluate if it’s the assignee, task details, estimated effort, dependencies, or task itself.

[Amanda_Elmore]

We’re also needing this functionality. Our use case is because users are changing their due dates but not using the Update dates for dependent task functionality so all downstream tasks will run overdue because the subsequent work can not begin yet. We’re looking to surface the tasks that have had their due dates updated so the operations team can ensure dependent task due dates are also updated.

[lpb]

A couple of us have offered solutions earlier in the thread, in case you missed those.

Thanks,

Larry

[lpb]

A client was interested in a solution here and here’s what I’ve come up with. I first did a search in the Forum and didn’t find anything better, and some incomplete threads too.

My solution can be tweaked if you want to track differently, but what you see below does the following:

• Adds tasks that experience a date change to a common “Date Changes” project
• Creates a subtask under the task logging the new Due date and the date it was updated. Tallying these gives a count of the number of date changes. The history of Due dates accumulates here, but for the first one, you have to look in the parent task’s activity log. (If you want to report on these, it might help to “tag” these subtasks with their own custom field to allow them to be used in a chart or advanced search.)
• Ignores the initial setting of the Due date

For those with Flowsana.net (@Phil_Seeman), this is easier, I believe, and also allows you to utilize the previous Due date as a variable which native Asana does not.

Thanks,

Larry