The task
Build a simple to use and easy to search through a database of event organizing solutions.
The situation
I’ve recently become the Head of Creative at an event production house. Coming from a very digital process oriented and background I’ve been stunned that most of the event industry still searches their mail to recall “that one cool guy that did this awesome bit at an event that we’ve organized 5 years ago at Nowhere County”. This is a complete waste of time and I’d like to speed things up.
The need
I’d like to build a database that everybody on the team could contribute to, where anybody could just type in (for example): “catering”+“low budget”+“vegan” and get a bunch of results that match those tags with entries that other team members made.
What I’m struggling with
I’ve started building a database like that in Evernote and it works pretty well for one or two people. But I want to do everything via Asana since the whole organizations use it for managing projects and communication. I don’t want to add another tool to the mix. I’m very, very new to Asana and I’m trying to figure how to build an easily searchable database that could contain images, videos, attached documents like PDFs or jpgs and be able to tag it and put those records into specific categories like “catering”, “multimedia”, “attractions”, etc.
Are you a Premium organization in Asana? If yes, then Custom Fields would be a great way to go. If not, I’ll think of a better solution =) (probably around tags and search)
Hey Bastien! Thanks for the tip. Yup, I’m in a Premium organisation. Have you done anything similar? Any chance for sharing a screenshot? I admit I’m completely lost as to how to even being to grapple with this.
For example you could setup a custom field with people (Bob, Alice…), and a custom field with category (catering, multimedia…). And you can create a custom advanced search to find all catering projects from Bob.
These are just two examples of custom fields, but you can have even more of them. Would that help?
At the moment you can’t tag attached document, but if they are alone in their task for example, the system above will work.
@Piotr_Gawinski - we’ve started planning this out for next year, and here’s the gist of what we’ve been discussing:
Creating a “Resource Team” instead of keeping this in a project. That will allow us to create multiple projects for multiple resources, without it cluttering up our main working space in our current team.
Using Custom Fields for “big buckets.” For example, our company is broken up into four geographic regions, so one of the custom fields will be “region” so we can easily identify region-specific resources.
Using Tags for “little buckets.” Either project type, specialty, etc.
To use your need example, we’d have a project for Catering, a custom field for budget tier (Low, Mid, High), and tags for specialty diets (vegan, vegetarian, allergen-friendly).
Interesting suggestion, would custom fields work if we’d have over 500+ clients? Currently we’ve been creating independent projects for each client but it’s becoming unmanageable. Thanks!
