Assigning teams to a projects?

Is there a way to assign a team to a project, rather than just individuals? For instance the project could be ‘Website Build’ and we need to assign Marketing Team, Design Team, Production Team etc. to a company wide project.

I don’t believe that’s possible. Partly because projects are set up at the team level. So your options are 1) to make another team with everyone that needs to be in it, or 2) you could add other teams as collaborators of the project.

Ok, I know how to add collaborators to a tasks, but how do you add collaborators to a whole project?

When you click on a project, there should be a share button next to the members. You can add them there.

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There are some trade-offs there as well in that they count as using up a seat on your team even though they only have access to a single project.

Oh I see, thank you. Yeah, using Asana to integrate workflow between different teams is not ideal. Generally ‘Teams’ in a workplace don’t operate in isolation from each other…

We struggle with that a bit, but I think we’ve worked out some good norms.

As a Team, not everyone we rely on to get our work done is in Asana. Our team is small but we service a large organization. When appropriate, we’ll sometimes add a single person from another team to a project until it’s complete if that person is highly involved. We then rely on that person to make sure their team is getting the work done given we have no direct influence on the team.

For cases where we don’t have a contact from another team added to ours, if we have blocking issues I’ll often create a follow-up task for myself. I use that task to remind me to check in with the person on the other team I know is responsible until things are moving again. I just set the due date to the day I want to check-in, send my email, and move the task into Later in My Tasks.

Another thing you could consider is a special “cross-team” team where you’re tracking cross-team or department/organizational goals and then just add key-stakeholders to that team from each area.

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Hey Justin, that’s the idea behind having projects be public to teams and then have teams be public to an organization. If you have a public project, then all members of the team can access it. And if your teams are public to the org, etc. etc.

We don’t do that, but that’s the philosophy of Asana, having it all be open and accessible to look at, etc.

Making projects public helps, but since projects can only be created under one team, the gantt/timeline functions only apply to that one team. This makes it difficult to plan multi-team projects, in which deliverables are passed back and forth between departments and they all need to be working from the same ‘master’ gantt timeline.

Well you create a master project, then if they want their own tasks in other projects they can multi-home the same task to multiple projects. So if there’s a website project, the design is in the design pipeline and master project - development task is in the dev master project and the specific project, etc.

I have pipeline projects for each team.

Ok, what do you mean by multi-home?

Ah sorry - it’s what we call adding tasks to multiple projects:

So one task can live in a dozen projects (though realistically more like 2-3 for me).

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Thank you, I’m going to look into that.