Propagate process changes to all active tasks & task lists

When you make changes and improvements to your process templates (as you should!), how do you make sure that all of the task lists that were copied from the old version of your process can get the latest updates—without disrupting the progress your team has made on those tasks?

By default (and by design), any changes made to a process template do not automatically update any active projects or their task lists.  We wouldn't want to disrupt active projects unexpectedly.  But if you do want to push your changes out to all active projects—as is often the case—then you can use the propagate changes feature to do this.

There are 3 flavors of propagating process changes to your tasks:

• (most common) When you need to propagate the entire process, and all of its changes, you can propagate an entire process.
• When you want to propagate only a single step's changes, and specificy which aspect of that step's changes to propagate, you can propagate a single step.
• When deleting a step in a process, you can "Delete & Propagate" so that all tasks that were copied from that deleted step are also deleted.

Propagate an entire process (most common)

Let's say you've made lots of changes to your process template.  You've re-titled steps, added new steps, deleted some steps, reordered steps, changed automations, changed people assignments... Or anything else!

Now you want to make sure that all task lists across all projects that were copied from this process template are updated to match the newest version.  Here's how:

1. In "Processes" > Inside the process template you've made changes to > Open this process template's settings dropdown (click "..." on the right side of the process template header), click "Propagate Process..."
2. It will show you the number of task lists across the number of projects that will be overwritten.
3. Click "Overwrite X task lists".
4. It might take a minute or two to complete the propagation... You can navigate away from this page while that's processing.

Visit any project that has a task list that was copied from this process template.  It should now reflect all of the latest changes!

Notes:  

• If on the project task list level, you've inserted any new tasks into a task list—but these inserted tasks were not added at the process template level—then after you propagate the process template, which updates this task list, those inserted tasks will remain intact, but they get pushed to the bottom of the task list.  You can manually reorder them if you need to.
• If the process changes included changes to any dynamic date rules, then those would cause their corresponding tasks dates to recalculate according to the new rules.  This includes any tasks that have date rules based on other tasks start or due dates.
• If you propagate changes from a process template, all blocks marked 'read only' will be updated. This helps keep the block's values in sync with the template.

Propagate a single step in a process

Let's say you've only made changes to a single step in a process template.  You want to propagate these changes only, while not propagating any other steps in the process.  Perhaps you want a bit more control over exactly which aspects of this step you want to propagate.

You can propagate a single step in a process by doing this:

1. Go to the step in the process template
2. Open this step's settings dropdown ("...")
3. Click "Propagate step..."
4. See the number of tasks that were copied from this process template step.
5. Check or uncheck the aspects of this step that you want to propagate, or not include in this propagation.
6. Click "Overwrite X tasks".
7. It might take a minute or two to complete the propagation... You can navigate away from this page while that's processing.

Note:  If the process changes included changes to any dynamic date rules, then those would cause their corresponding tasks dates to recalculate according to the new rules.  This includes any tasks that have date rules based on other tasks start or due dates.

Delete & Propagate

You identified a step in a process template that is no longer necessary.  You want to delete it from the process template and delete all of the tasks that were copied from this step.  Here's how to do that:

1. Go to the step in the process template that you want to delete.
2. Open this step's settings dropdown ("...")
3. Click "Delete & Propagate..."
4. See the number of tasks that were copied from this process template step.
5. Click "Delete step & X tasks."
6. It might take a minute or two to complete the propagation... You can navigate away from this page while that's processing.