Analyze workload and team communication

Hi!

There is one thing I would love to have more insights about. How is it possible to analyze the workloads for team members and wheter team communication is efficient? There are several KPIs that would make Asana more transparent and insightful from an operational view.

KPI examples:

  • Number of tasks created per Team Member
  • Number of tasks closed per Team Member
  • Follow of closed tasks (as an indicator of being involved in closing/processing that task)
  • Number of tasks assigned to other team members
  • Number of tasks created and assigned to ā€˜meā€™
  • Number of tasks commented
  • Number of Task touchpoints (how many tasks have been assigned to me but are not necessarily still assigned to a person)

With that information, it would be possible to grasp the hidden communication dynamics within teams. Asana is like playing 10 player ping pong without seeing the ball fly, to give it a picture. And counting balls where they land (where tasks were closed) wonĀ“t give a clear picture where the ball has been during his journey.

This came to my mind when I received tasks that were not clear. That leads to communication efforts that are quite useless as the task should have been expressed clearly from the very beginning. From an operational point of view, it is important to identify team members who make team communication inefficient.

I hope I was able to express my thoughts about this. :slight_smile:

Thanks for your Feedback and expansions on this topic!
AndrƩ

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I kind of agree.

I agree cause the more we know, the more we can learn. About your goal: these KPIs would indeed help you to evaluate workload, at least in terms of tasks.

Now regarding team communication: is your goal to have lots of tasks touched and moved, or is it to have your project landing on time? On my side, I create OKRs and strategic goals with my teams, then I can track how our projects are doing (and usually if projects are doing well it means the communication within and between projects is good).

Any thoughts?

Thank you, @Gilles !

My goal is to make our communication more efficient. I looked at it from the perspective of the theory of constraints which sticked since I read ā€œThe Goalā€ from Eliyahu M. Goldratt. ItĀ“s about a manufacturing process but itĀ“s also applicable to communication processes. Replace machines with people and your inventory will go up at communication touchpoints that have to much ā€œmaterialā€ delivered to them. Especially in a software company the assembly line is invisible and therefore, visibility of communication would be very helpful.

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@Andre_Pollklesener The KPI examples you gave are exactly the type of insights that we wanted to surface when we created Velocity, which is an Asana integration that lets you create reports and dashboards of these kinds of metrics/KPIs for Asana.

You can see example reports on our demo site, and you could sign up for a free trial to try out Velocity for free with your Asana data.

Weā€™ve seen validation of your sentiment of ā€œthe more we know, the more we can learnā€ with our customers. In general, weā€™ve found that there are many cases in which our customers are unaware of important trends in their Asana instance, and they only start to determine what metrics are most important to their organization after exploring their Asana data in a reporting interface.

(Disclosure: Iā€™m a cofounder of Velocity.)

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Hi @Tom_Benner, thank you, IĀ“ll definitely have a look at it!