Project Hierarchy / Projects / Subprojects / Sections / Tasks / Subtasks

I feel that the most glaring weakness of Asana is the lack of any defined options to establish a project hierarchy. Currently, the only way to group projects is by establishing teams (if you are a premium user). However, even that can get very cluttered.

When kicking off a large projects, it would be fantastic to break it down into multiple sub-projects rather than sections. That will reduce clutter and allow users to hone in on sub-projects. Currently, sections, though useful, are not collapsible, so projects can get very lengthy.

Furthermore, a user should be able to drill into a sub-project and see a defined breakout of the sections, tasks, and subtasks.

Thank you.

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Weakness or strength? My feeling is that another level could be confusing and make the product more complex. But I agree that managing many projects/tasks can be challenging… @Julien_RENAUD any suggestion on the subject?

Another topic is already opened, see:
https://forum.asana.com/t/project-folders/

As subtasks are not easy to use I would also appreciate to group some projects. For project with several members involved (research, marketing, finance,…), having only one project with sections leads to a very long list of tasks, even too long… For this reason we have already doubled some projects but not ideal because the project’s list becomes long. Thus for very big project we have decided to convert the project into a team.

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I hear what you are saying, @James_Leo. Two current workarounds for sorting projects:

  1. Group with color-coding
  2. Use an empty project as a placeholder/title project.

See image below for an example combining these approaches.

Todd
projectmanagementpros.com

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Hey team, great post of question and answers. I learned much from this. I have to say…I’m going with strength here. I encourage Asana users to cease managing projects from the grouping of projects and to rely on Advanced Search saved reports instead. In the advanced search, you can add multiple projects, certain or all assignees, date ranges, tags, etc. Instead of trying to build your hierarchy on the left hand side of the page, refer back to your saved report. You can share the report with others and then just refine your search to make small or large changes. Then, each person gets their own view, especially if you add the “Followed By” filter. Try it and let me know what you think.

Heath - I can appreciate the benefits of that approach. However, in my opinion, a successful project management tool is one that is designed for the lowest common denominator on the team so onboarding is simple and compliance is maintained. What you’re describing is something that would work for power users, but not necessarily for a junior team member. That is why I believe an intuitive hierarchy is a must. Just my opinion of course, but there most be a reason why is a standard feature out in the marketplace.

Thanks again for the insight.

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I will reiterate the suggestion of Evernote’s use of folders Notebook%20ClosedEvernote%20Folder%20System-Expandedwhich are simply created by dragging notebooks on top of each other which then the user is prompted name the folder.

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I’d like to see it done similar to how Wrike handles multiple levels of sub-projects (and nested task indents), makes it much easier to work with project phases and other types of sub-projects.

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I realize this requires a Business or Enterprise account but I think in the Asana vision, Portfolios represent that hierarchical level of organization that’s one-level-above-projects that you’re discussing.

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Phil - Thanks. Having tested portfolios, aside from the widespread gripes of the price increase, it still doesn’t provide the hierarchy I’m referring to. As Jeff mentioned above, Wrike does it really well, as does ClickUp and most other platforms.

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I would like some type of subproject or grouping mechanism. My projects created for Agendas/meetings would be nice to group under a parent b/c I don’t need to seem them on the same level as the actual projects.

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I’m looking for the same kind of functionality - basically a means to decompose tasks into subtasks as well as sequences. An ideal tool would have a means of visualizing and having recursive action at the subnodes, but perhaps that is just a special case of mine. Asana has so many of the features I have come to love and depend on that it seems like there should be some way to accommodate some of these “power-functions”.
A methods that is close using the existing feature framework is using the “@” hypertext - basically link upwards(?) to a superclass task (or really in any direction)

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I agree we need multi level project/subprojects/subtasks as in Wrike or Todoist. I heard about 80% of people are visual so no way you can see through a complex project structure unless you can see them in hierarchical structure. Most real life work projects are not a simple shopping lists types they are complex workflows and need multiple levels of projects and tasks.
I don’t get why on earth could it be a strength not to have the option to have multiple level of projects? as you dont have to use it even if the option is there so everyone should be happy.

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I would love to see subprojects feature as well. I work for a race management company in marketing. I have a marketing project that ends up having dozens of sections with hundreds of tasks under each. Creating separate projects for each subproject does not make sense for us since we need to see all of the marketing tasks in one large project it is just very unwieldy the way it is now and would be so much simpler if we could create subtasks.

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It is certainly a strength from a competition perspective, too. Asana’s competitors have subprojects. As the saying goes: “If you can’t lead, then follow. If you can’t follow, get out of the game.”

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Can’t agree more with this request. I’m a Wrike user and love the hierarchy with projects and folders. It’s really what is missing here. It’s the must have feature that makes me stick for now with the competition. Which is sad as pricing here is better :slight_smile:

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I also want a project hierarchy as in Wrike or even MS Project. Our projects can have hundreds or even thousands of tasks and can be planned over several months. We need to be able to roll up sub-tasks into a parent task where the end date of the parent task is the latest end date of its sub-tasks, etc. We switched from Asana to Wrike for this feature, and its the only thing keeping the 300+ users we have from switching back to Asana.

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Thanks Michael for your feedback. We are looking for a project management software and we have about the same kind of criticity : we follow around 1500 projects every year (around 100 tasks per project) with 500 users.
So we are clearly wandering if we can organize this volume of projects in asana. Somme feedback ?

Hi @David_Kierbel and welcome to the forum!

Just for some general input, I’ve seen Asana customers who have the following approximate volumes:

Users - 15,000
Projects - 6,000
Task per project - 300

Obviously there’s a lot of details “in the weeds” below this which would determine if Asana is right for your organization, but I wanted to at least give you some feedback that your volumes are well under these numbers that I know people have already implemented.

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