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Request tracking

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Available on Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ plans. See our pricing page for more information.

With request tracking, teams can efficiently handle large volumes of requests and tickets, track issue resolution, and maintain a comprehensive overview of request status.

Request tracking stages

When setting up request tracking or ticketing, there are four key stages; intake, triage, execution, and reporting.

  1. Intake: This happens when a request comes in through a form. Once the request lands in a project, it is then triaged.
  2. Triage: Requests are triaged, urgent requests are prioritized.
  3. Execute: Once the request has been triaged, agents can start working on it. Depending on the request's need, it can be reassigned to agents as needed and moved to other queues. 
  4. Reporting: To ensure that SLAs are being managed correctly, continuous tracking of requests is put in place through reporting.

Get started quickly with templates

To get started quickly, Asana offers several specialized templates designed for different request tracking scenarios. Follow the direct links below to see them in the template gallery:

Request tracking template - Track every incoming request, route it to the right team, and monitor progress until completion.

Ticketing template - Set up a ticketing workflow that gets you from request submission to resolution, faster.

Creative requests template - Manage creative requests from intake to final delivery with a structured workflow.

Work intake template - Ensure your team works on what matters most. Standardize intake, assess resourcing needs, and manage approvals. 

From there, click Use template in the top-right corner, and create the project.

When the project is created from the template, you will be guided through customizing the workflow by optionally editing the form, rules, templates, and project settings.

When you've finished modifying the workflow to suit your needs, click Done.

Request submission form

To set up your request tracking workflow, you will need an intake form. If you have used the template to create the project, the form has already been created for you. You can keep form submitters across your organization in the loop of their requests, even if they don’t have an Asana license. The gif below shows how to set this up via the form settings.

Creating a ticketing form

Note iconNote

Ticket submitters don’t need an Asana license. However, they must have an email with the organization’s domain.

Ticket replies

In the example above we can see the following:

  1. Eric doesn’t have an Asana license, but he was able to reply via email to enquire about the status of a request. Even though it was sent via email, this comment was received in Asana as a comment.
  2. Hailey, who has an Asana license, comments on the task and asks Josef to take over this request. Eric won’t see this comment.
  3. Josef, who has an Asana license, comments on the task and checks the Send response to submitter box. Eric will receive Josef’s comment via email.
  4. Josef comments once again on the task. Eric won’t see this comment.
  5. Josef has just checked the checkbox so the next message will be sent to Eric

Here’s an example of what a response from Josef would look like for Eric.

Ticket email

Custom task types and status

Use custom task types to track a ticket's lifecycle and monitor the work status. Pre-set statuses have already been set when using the Request tracking template to create the project.

From the task template window you’ll see the options for your custom task at the top of the task details pane.

Custom field

Project schedules

Define work days and hours for your project from your project settings. You can choose a specific timezone, work days, and start and end times.

This is particularly useful when you want SLA for intake requests to be paused during non-working days or hours.

Project settings

To access your project’s settings navigate to the Customize menu and click the Project settings button at the bottom of the list.

Project settings

Creating rules for SLAs

With the timer custom field added to the project automatically, you can modify existing rules or add new rules to track SLAs. You can view the rules that have automatically added to the project via the template by clicking Customize, then Rules. If you wish to add more rules, visiting the rules gallery is a good place to start. To visit the rules gallery, click the + Add button within the rules menu. The rules gallery contains pre-set rules as well as pre-set AI-powered rules for customers using Asana's AI Studio.

Rules examples

The example below shows an AI-powered rule that is automatically added when the project is created using the template. This and other AI-powered rules appear automatically for customers using AI Studio. Customers who are not using AI Studio will still experience a fully functional request tracking project, just without the addition of AI-powered rules.

In this example, a manual rule trigger is used to draft a response to the form submitter. The guidance and mechanics of the rule are already in place, but may be edited to more closely suit your team's needs.

There are many other rules that are useful for a request tracking project, such as:

  • Acknowledgement: add a pre-written comment whenever a task is received
  • Assignment: automatically assign a colleague to triage a ticket, or use AI to implement a rotation
  • Routing: multi-home tasks to another project based on the request type

Response and resolution times

Response and resolution times, like service level agreements (SLAs), are crucial for managing tickets effectively as they establish clear expectations for response and resolution times. SLAs create accountability by setting defined timeframes for addressing issues, which helps prioritize work and allocate resources efficiently. 

With the timer custom field, agents can see how much time they have left on specific tickets to stay within SLA, and managers can keep track of SLA adherence and achievement. The timer custom field has already been added to the project when created using the template. It is not present in the Creative requests template.

Enterprise and Enterprise+ customers can follow the steps below to ensure that timers can’t be manually paused or resumed in the Project permissions.

Access project permissions

To access your project permissions:

  1. Click the Share button at the top right of your project
  2. Click the Project permissions icon at the top right
  3. In the Fields section, click + Add restriction
  4. Choose your custom field

Reporting

Reporting is made easy because the template includes a pre-built performance dashboard. Click the Performance dashboard tab in the top bar, and rearrange, customize, or modify the dashboards and the data they collect.

Performance dashboard

Tips to increase project performance

When using a request tracking project, it is expected that project performance remains high with the exception of rare slow events when working with a very large number of tasks or custom fields.

If scrolling through or viewing thousands of tasks begins to slow project performance, we recommend limiting the number of visible tasks in list view at any one time. This can be achieved by filtering out completed tasks and saving this view as a default, as well as moving completed tasks to their own section and collapsing this section. You may also choose to create user-level saved views which filter out unassigned and completed tasks.

When using the Group by option, we recommend limiting this to one grouping at a time, as multiple groupings can degrade the performance of the project, particularly with a very large number of tasks. Similarly, with a large number of tasks, it is best to avoid using sorts with the countdown field or other custom fields which could affect performance.

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How to track requests in Asana | Asana Help Center