TL:DR - Can’t get rule ‘approval completed > move task to section’ to work.*
Hi all!
I am super excited about the new Workflows in Asana as it seems like it might solve some problems we are having.
For context, we use an Asana project in the boards view to manage all our approvals. Each board/section is an approval stage; Assigned>In progress>QA>UAT>Complete.
I have set up workflows to add an approval to a task when it is moved to a new section, for example, the task is moved to UAT, so a UAT approval task is added.
What I would love to set up is that when the UAT approval task is marked as approved, it then moves the task to the next section - UAT.
When reading about workflows, and having a play in a test project, I thought I should be able to do this. When I set it all up in workflows and ran a test task through the process, the approvals are added at each stage, but the rule - approval complete > task moves to a new section, does not work.
Any hints or tips are appreciated!
How it looks in Workflows:
The rule I have set up :
2 Likes
Hi @Larissa, welcome to the Asana Community Forum 
Thanks for reaching out! Could you please explain a little bit more why you cannot get the Rule ‘approval completed > move task to section’ to work? You have mentioned that you have set it up but I’m not sure what the specific blocker is.
Looking forward to hearing back from you 
The way you set it up @Larissa is that in the first step it does not change the task to an approval but add an Approval subtask to the main task, therefore the second rule does not trigger. It’s waiting for a Main task that’s also an approval task and this never comes.
According to my knowledge, this cannot be done natively inside of a sauna, but can be done with the third-party application called Flowsana.
Here is a step-by-step guide:
1 Like
@Rebecca_McGrath - Based on what Paul has said, I think the issue is that the approval is a subtask and therefore does not work. Is this correct?
@Paul_Grobler - Ok, that makes sense - I need the approval to be the main task, not a subtask for it to work. I don’t know if that setup will work for our process. Each task is an item that moves through a creation and approval process, with approval subtasks assigned to different people. For example:
This task then moves through the project depending on its stage.
I hoped to have the task ‘Create EDM Newsletter’ move automatically to the next column when the previous approval was ticked off. QA approval done → automatically moves to the UAT approval column.
The reliance on humans to move things to the next column is where our process is falling down at the moment. There is a push to move the process out of Asana and into Jira for this reason. I am hoping to keep it in Asana, so we have all our project work and approvals in one place.
Flowsana looks good, but I don’t think I can convince my org to pay for another service. It took years to get paid Asana (I work for an NFP)!
Thank you both for your help.
One option you could think about is using a custom field on the main task to see if a task is reviewed and then the person assigned in the subtask should change the field to reviewed or approved when finished. This can then trigger the main task to go to the next stage.
2 Likes
That may just work! I will test it out. Thank you.
This topic was automatically closed after 6 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
