I’m opening this discussion to gather insights and ideas on Asana best practices for managing small projects (e.g., 2-week duration) with smaller teams (around 10 people).
##Example Scenario
Let’s take a project like a Social Media Campaign:
Duration: 2 weeks
Team: 5 members (Copywriter, Creative Designer, QA Specialist, Social Media Manager for Posting, and Analytics Specialist)
Key Questions
Task and Subtask Structure:
Do you recommend creating a single project with main tasks and subtasks under each main task, or is there a better approach for small, agile projects?
Managing Notifications:
Team members have expressed concerns about receiving too many tasks in their inbox. They prefer tasks to be assigned only when needed to avoid overload. How can we manage assignments and notifications more effectively while maintaining clarity and accountability?
Agile Workflow and Date Ranges:
Since this is an agile project, tasks aren’t worked on serially but collaboratively within a defined date range. For example:
All tasks might have the same start and end date (e.g., Week 1-2).
Would adding milestones at the end of each task be a good way to track progress? Or are there other strategies to balance collaboration while avoiding rigid due dates?
Current Challenges
We’re transitioning from a very serial approach where a single task was reassigned between team members as work progressed. While this approach kept notifications manageable, it also created inefficiencies and limited collaboration.
For example:
Social Media Campaign Workflow:
Task 1: Create Copy
Subtasks:
Subtask 1: Copy 1 IG
Subtask 2: Copy X
Subtask 3: Copy FB
Task 2: Create Assets
Subtasks:
Subtask 1: Image IG
Subtask 2: Image X
Subtask 3: Image FB
Task 3: QA
Subtasks:
Subtask 1: QA 1
Subtask 2: QA 2
While this structure supports transparency, team members find the volume of tasks overwhelming. At the same time, we’re striving to maintain the flexibility of agile workflows and ensure effective collaboration.
What We’re Hoping to Achieve
We aim to implement Asana best practices that:
Reduce inbox overload for team members.
Facilitate a more agile, collaborative approach without losing accountability.
Improve efficiency while maintaining clarity of work ownership and deadlines.
I’d appreciate any suggestions, insights, or examples of how you’ve managed similar projects in Asana.
With Asana’s flexibility, there are a ton of different ways you could accomplish this.
I personally would have 1 project that houses all of the scheduled social media campaigns as tasks with due dates and then automate them to convert to a project x amount of days before work should begin.
You could create a task template within the Scheduled Social Media Campaigns project with the following structure:
Subtask Sections: IG, X, FB, QA
Subtasks under IG, X, FB: Create copy, Create Image
Subtasks under QA: QA1, QA2
Not assigning the subtasks and waiting until you convert to a project would keep the notifications limited to only things that are currently being worked on, while still providing a means to plan and schedule.
I did not include milestones, but if you were tracking multiple projects with a portfolio, having one for each section wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Below is a rough idea of what each converted project looks like in my mind.
Please keep in mind this is just a rough idea! These sections could be set up anyway that works best for you. You could even do a single select for Platform so that they can group all of their IG, X, FB, or QA tasks together in their My tasks. I think that this type of project creation is great to be able to plan and schedule without overloading inbox notifications though, especially if the start dates tend to change.
@Jeremy_Longthank you so much for taking the time to respond and provide some ideas. Really appreciate it.
As I was looking for best practices I came along the concept of Bundles in Asana. What are your thoughts? For example taking your approach and bundle it?
The workflow will look something like this
Intake Form captures the task and the type of work (social media, newsletter, email, etc) plus the brief
Form comes in as a task into Marketing Delivery Work Board (asana main board where we collect work)
t assigns it to the PM for Validation that the intake form is complete and the brief is complete
PM then approve it and move it and the PM converts it into a Project
Once it coverts it into a project, the PM will add a bundle to that project based on the type of work
(if this could be done automatically even better) The type of work is under a customized field.
The bundle will be similar to your project example plus some rules etc.
Once the bundle is activate then the people will be notified that a task has been assigned to them in their inbox
Please Let me know if this workflow above makes sense with the use of Bundles or it is too complicated and just use rules with auto generated tasks.
Also something that the team requested was that they don’t like to get like 10 tasks in their inbox they would like to get the task when it is the time for each of the teams to start working on it. However the work that they need to do is in parallel not serially (meaning copy finish and sends to creative) it is essentially Copy and Creative working at the same time together. How can I use Rules and customized fields to have the tasks show up on the people’s inbox only at the time that they need to do the work?
Thank you in advance to you and the people in this forum. Just trying to understand best practices in using Asana.
@Frank_So I have studied bundles, but I’m afraid I don’t have much experience with them. I only just gained access to them last week. @Jan-Rienk and @Bastien_Siebman have shared some great information about bundles; maybe they could recommend their use in this case?
This is exactly what I’m interested in finding out too. @Frank_So - would be really interested to hear your insights / experiences in this questionnaire that I’m running for some research I’m doing.
How difficult is it to get Asana set up to do what you need?
I would refrain from giving “best practice” advice, as work management is too complex. Every team is different, and I don’t fully know your context, and I’m sceptical towards anyone claiming to know what’s best. I have some ideas about good practice and continuous improvement though.
I don’t have nearly enough context to start answering this. How are you working currently? What do you like about it and what don’t you?
What’s the need for assigning work? If you’re working in an agile way, isn’t it sufficient to make the team collaborators on the desired outcome (Which I’d use the milestone for) and leave it up to them to self assign work?
Milestones are a desired state of things. Good practice would be to start describing tasks with a verb, as it is an activity, and use milestones to describe the valuable outcome you want your team to achieve. This is why milestones can’t have a start date.
I’m begining to wonder what you mean by “agile project”. Is there a specific framework you are using?
Agile Software Development was born as a counter to traditional project(mis)management, in software. I generally don’t care about whether something is agile or not, but if it works, which often requires using the right tool for the job. In my experience (within the spirit of agility) it is often good to iterate on the current process to improve. Keep wat works, find ways to improve what doesn’t work.
So how are you working now, and what’s the most important think you’d want to change to make it more collaborative?
Regarding bundles, see this article to find my reccommended practice when using bundles: Streamline work using Bundles
