Hi,
I often have the opportunity to evaluate my client’s Asana “systems” and share my insights: do I believe their system is good? Can it scale? Are they gonna hit roadblocks soon? Can I suggest better?
For years, I based my judgment on my personal experience and my gut feeling. I never had the intention of formalizing that approach. But after all, that makes sense. If I could turn that gut feeling into a real framework to evaluate someone’s system, then I would be able to give actionable feedback and compare systems!
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version française disponible Une grille d’évaluation des systèmes Asana)
What I am calling a system is the way a specific workflow is organized in Asana with projects, tasks, custom fields, tags, and best practices.
My “biggest” system in Asana is to manage my client pipeline with opportunities and deals, as well as the actual work with them (sessions and tasks) and the billing. Do you decide to have one project per client or just tasks? Are invoices subtasks or actual tasks themselves? Are you able to see all the pending invoices or all clients you haven’t talked to in a while?
In my opinion, a system should be evaluated against 6 criteria: Balance, Search, Navigation, Export, History, Setup. The perfect system does not exist, but with these criteria, you are able to clearly decide.
Balance
A system needs to be well balanced. Your projects need to be filled with tasks, not just one or two. If you are using subtasks, you shouldn’t have to need too many of them on a single task. Also the system should be able to scale and not produce data expontentially.
Components of an unbalanced system:
- projects with one or two tasks
- tasks with more than 20 subtasks
- a new project created very often without the possibility to archive it
Search
A good system allows you to search for information easily. You should be able to extract almost any piece of data only using the advanced search, like all the outdated invoices, all the prospects you are discussing with, all the tasks related to a client…
Components of an unsearchable system:
- information stored in task descriptions
- information stored in project or tasks names
Navigation
In a well-designed system, you can move around easily and navigate between entities with as little actions as possible. You should be able to search for a client and then go to their invoices, back to the client, dive into the history of your discussions…
Components of a system with difficult navigation:
- having to find a linked entity by running complex search (like "search for invoices for which the custom field “Customer” is “…”)
Export
Not all businesses require that part, but a good system should allow you to export data in a structured way. That means being able to move your entire system content into a spreadsheet and run filters and sort. Usually, if a system is good with the Search part, it means it is underlyingly structured and the export will be easy to work with. With the exception of subtasks, that could be hard to work with once outside of Asana.
Components of an unexportable system:
- information stored in task descriptions
- information stored in project or tasks names
- several layers of subtasks
History
In a well-designed system, you should be able to go back in time and analyze data from the past. New information should not erase previous information. If you do regular events with the same partners, you should be able to access previous events for example.
Components of a system without history:
- recurring events are setup/discussed on top of previous events
- tasks are not part of any project and basically lost
Setup
A good system should be easy to set up and maintain. Relying on complex multi-homing, or many steps that can’t be automated is a no-go.
Components of a system not maintainable:
- a new entity requires several projects and tasks
- any task needs to be multi-homed into several projects, and forgetting one would be detrimental
Let’s analyze my own system against this framework.
My prospects are represented as tasks in a dedicated project. Once they become a client, the task is moved to the project with all the other clients + I create a project for that client based on a template. The client task is multi-homed into its project, and stays as the first task. Each client’s project has a section for sessions I have with them, and invoices. Sessions are also multi-homed into a session project, and invoices multi-homed into an Invoice project.
Balance: one project per client is acceptable, since I archive the project when my work with a client is done. My clients project hold many important information, and I barely use subtasks.
Search: thanks to the split between several projects and the heavy use of custom fields, I am able to run complex search.
Navigation: from a client’s task I can navigate to the client’s project, then into the sessions or the invoices
Export: I am able to export all my clients, all my invoices, all my sessions, easily
History: each new session with a client is a new task, and the client’s task holds comment about the history of discussions
Setup: creating a new client from a prospect requires a bit of work, but that takes a few seconds and that is acceptable given the amount of clients.
Make sure to also read @lpb post on balance Architectural Balance in Asana (Ebook Free Chapter)
What do you think? Any suggestion on how to improve the framework? Any cool name for it? 
