Projects as Tasks OR Project within a Project

This is an older post but while I was in Evernote today I observed how extensively I use the Stacks feature
https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208314158. It is not really the physical creation of another project to hold other projects, but what looks like a project when you drag a project on top of each other. When you do this, it creates a folder that looks like a project and you name it accordingly. Not totally dissimilar to how you can organize your Iphone. Maybe this would be a consideration for Asana to organize the left pane in addition to my favorite request of a single ± expand/collapse to the Team level.

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Huge +1 here. I’ve been aching for this for a while. Here’s another good use case:

  • We’re a development team managing projects for stakeholders within the business.
  • We have 2-week release cycles.
  • Stakeholders want to know how much progress we’ve made on our goals for each project they care about (i.e., what percentage of tasks are done). This implies “dashboard” access for stakeholders on these projects.
  • We need to know which projects we’re prioritizing this sprint, implying task-level management for projects within the sprint cycle.

@Alexis’ solution of linking projects into task descriptions is alright, but it can’t tell us how close we are to completing the sprint on time, as we can’t report on aggregate project data.

It seems to me that, since projects and tasks have similar structure (title, description, owner, due date, subtasks), you could fairly easily generalize the reporting functionality so that we could run arbitrary “doneness” reports on individual tasks.

Anyway, just let the record show that there’s one more supporter for the idea of projects within projects!

Thanks,
Kael

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I am using the Editorial Calendar Template, which is a project.

  • What I need is to create several projects within that Editorial Calendar project.

  • I need those several projects to show up on the Editorial Calendar, and each project will have tasks and sub-Tasks.

  • Basically, I need one Calendar with several projects on it, all showing at one glance on the calendar.

I cannot figure out how to create projects within the Editorial Calendar Template (Asana template). It will only let me create tasks. The problem with this, is that I also need those Tasks to show up on the Editorial Calendar, but they don’t (because they are Tasks and not Projects).

I am a one-person team; I do not need to share this Editorial Calendar. I do need it to keep me on track with the many projects I have going.

Can someone please tell me a simple way to create a project within the Editorial Calendar project??

thanks

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Hi @Elaine_Lucia,

Technically we can’t nest Asana projects within other Asana projects. However, we have lots of flexibility for managing different work campaigns (work projects) within Asana.

I suggest that you create sections within the Asana project to signify the many campaigns your managing within that Asana project. In order to create Sections, just create an ordinary task and put a colon [ : ] at the end.

If this doesn’t suit you, then I suggest you create an Asana “team” that you name Editorial Calendars. Then, each Asana project within the Asana team can be a separate campaign you’re working on.

Please let us know if you have follow up questions.

Thanks,
Alexis

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Apparently, it is possible to create sections within sections – in other words, sub-sections. That is to say, you can create a project and add sections to it, and you can further deepen it by adding sub-sections to those sections. This is not the same as adding sections to a task, although I am curious if it is possible to add sub-sections within sections – within tasks.

I’ve seen this at work in the “My Tasks” tab under the “Later” Section. When you add a task that is part of a project to the “Later” section, it will display the project as a sub-section and the task under it. It does not display the section that you have that task under in that project, but nonetheless the “Later” section automatically creates sub-sections when you add these types of tasks to it. Below is an example, I added a task that was within a project called “Business Plan” I created for my BewareOfMUTT Team and this is what happened.

I want to be able to create sub-sections within projects myself, how can I do this?

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This is what I’m trying to figure out right now.
We have a Project for every Project my team is working on (be it a blog post, a social post, a case study, etc.).
I need to corral all like Projects together into a calendar view (i.e. an Editorial Calendar, a Social Calendar, etc.).
I started with Portfolios, but these don’t let me see a calendar.
So I tried to create an Editorial Calendar PROJECT, but it won’t let me add the individual Projects (of work to be done) to the calendar-view Project (of all related Editorial PROJECTS).

HELP!

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Hi @Jessica_Martin :wave:

In this case, you can use the Team Calendar to see the tasks from all of your Team’s projects displayed in a single view.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any follow-up question! :slight_smile:

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Pretty much the exact same thing here. We’re looking at an overall yearly backlog (2020 for example) which has kanban lanes for each month. But we also need monthly projects to manage the monthly releases (which has kanban lanes for task status - and we can’t use the “status” field as we want to be able to go back and take a look for example at everything we did in October.

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LOL no one seems to be using Asana as intended. It’s all a big workaround, which make some features unusable, so we need
 more workarounds!

We have an editorial team as well. Where each piece of content is a project in real life, but we cannot have them as a project on Asana, since having hundreds of projects on a sidebar or a rudimentary Team Screen makes the whole thing cluttered and useless.

Wouldn’t creating a Team Screen that has the looks and functionality of current Projects solve the whole thing?

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