tl;dr
Quickly create <Team Name> Main projects (see screenshot below) corresponding to each of your Asana workgroup teams.
Unleash this Default Workflow immediately to foster intra- and inter-team collaboration, accelerate onboarding, clarify projects in which tasks should be added, and avoid lengthy discovery and workflow design initially, yet still bootstrap fast, effective, and orderly Asana usage.
Overview
I routinely help organizations new to Asana as well as those who have used Asana but are struggling. I’ve had success using a shortcut approach that I call the Default Workflow.
This Default Workflow can be up and running in minutes and facilitates immediate use of Asana organization-wide (after some training, ideally) without encountering the chicken-and-egg problem of lengthy discovery and custom workflow design sessions and implementation.
It builds upon the fundamental approach of starting with Teams, and it promotes the best practice of ensuring that every task belongs to a project.
Start with Teams
Teams in Asana are workgroups of people, and starting there ensures getting off on the right foot. Consider your organization chart as a possible roadmap: create one team for each box/department. Also, create one “All Staff” team in which everyone is a member.
<Team Name> Main Projects
The crux of the Default Workflow approach is duplicating one new <Team Name> Main project for each team. Teams can immediately start to use their Main project to house their work. Also, others in the organization can use each team’s “New” project section as the team’s Team Inbox to assign work to that team by homing or multi-homing a task there. This facilitates cross-functional, organization-wide collaboration by the simple convention of being able to rely on all teams having a <Team Name> Main project with a “New” section. Beyond that, each team is free to develop its own unique manual or automated triaging process based upon tasks entering these common “New” sections.
Consider these Main projects as:
- An initial place to house your team’s work
- An ongoing catch-all place to house small or unrelated work that doesn’t fit in those other purpose-built projects you create as you use Asana more, and is too small for its own separate project
Here’s the simple structure of each <Team Name> Main project:
See Setup Steps > [Expand] below for details of the overall purpose and usage of these Main projects and each of their sections.
Note the default columns shown (which are present in all List views), besides the typical Assignee and Due date columns:
- Critical: An org-wide single-select “Critical” custom field with just one value (
) is part of this workflow. (See also my Forum Leader Tip on this.) - Projects: See/edit project multi-homing at a glance without opening the task detail pane
- Collaborators: See/edit task collaborators at a glance without opening the task detail pane
The default List view tab shown above is accompanied by three other tab views:
- List: Critical: Applies a filter (“Critical is ”) to show only critical tasks
- List: Date: Applies a grouping (“Group by Due date, Ascending, Hide empty groups”) to group tasks in automatically-generated date-based ordered buckets
- List: Me: Applies a filter (“Assignee is me (dynamic)”) to show those tasks assigned to you, the logged-in Asana user
All views are filtered to show only incomplete tasks, reducing the clutter by hiding completed tasks.
Together, these four views that offer alternative perspectives on your team’s work may cover all the “pivots” you need to manage your team’s tasks. Consider using this set of tab views on your other projects, too; I find these have wide applicability. Tabbed views are a powerful, simple, yet vastly underused Asana feature.
Setup Steps
First, create your teams, or at least the key ones you’d like to start with. See Start with Teams above and Asana’s Help as needed.
Create a model project called “<Team Name> Main”. This is a regular Asana project (not a project template) you will use as described below to create each actual <Team Name> Main project. Set the Project Owner and the various settings in the Share dialog to defaults (you can override them in each team’s duplicated project). The Share dialog > Access settings should be public to your organization (not Private to members) to enable org-wide collabration as described below).
[Expand] Put this in the *model* project's Overview > Project description:
This “Main”-type project:
- An initial place to house your team’s work
- An ongoing catch-all place to house small or unrelated work that doesn’t fit in those other purpose-built projects you create as you use Asana more, and is too small for its own separate project
- Use the default sections as explained below
- Add more sections if you need them:
- But only add sections with lasting value; for example, a “Waiting/Pending/Blocked” section(s) would be a good addition
- Don’t add “one-off” sections that will soon become unhelpful or outdated; they will add clutter because they can’t be removed without also losing the context for tasks in them
Default sections are used as follows:
- New
- Your team can add new actionable work here
- Other teams can use this section to channel work to your team
- At least one team member should regularly triage work added here
- In the project’s Share dialog, add triager(s) as project members, and click Manage Notifications so you can toggle on their “Tasks added” checkbox
- Triagers will receive an Asana Inbox notification for every new task added
- Triage the task by adding collaborators, making sure the task is clear (or commenting for the requester to further clarify), assigning, adding a due date (perhaps), and moving to another appropriate section
- Keep this section empty so you can spot new additions
- Current
- Actionable work you expect to complete in the near term
- Perhaps list the most current / highest priority tasks first
- Future
- Actionable work in your backlog
- Move to Current when you have time to work on it
- Reference
- Non-actionable information, links, contacts, reference documentation, etc. that you want to keep handy
By Larry Berger, Trilogi Solutions
Create the Critical custom field described earlier.
Create the project sections shown in the screenshot earlier.
Click the List tab, use Options > Show/hide columns to replicate the screenshot, click Filter > Incomplete tasks, then Save view to save those as defaults for that tab.
Click the List tab twice, then choose Make a copy, and rename this new tab to “List: Critical.” Click Filter > Critical, then Save view.
Repeat the previous step for the two additional tabs to be added as described earlier: “List: Date” and “List: Me.”
For each workgroup team you have, duplicate the model project via the Project actions > Duplicate menu item. In the Duplicate dialog:
- In the Project name field, replace <Team Name> with the actual name of the name (keeping the word Main)
- In the Team field, choose the Asana team name
- Among the checkboxes, toggle on the “Project description” checkbox, and generally use defaults otherwise
In each duplicated Main project:
- In the Project actions menu > Edit project details, set the Project Owner as appropriate, perhaps to the team’s manager or lead
- In the Share dialog, update Members, their permissions, and Manage Notifications settings as appropriate. At least one person to act as a triager should be added to the Members list so you can check their Manage notifications > “Tasks added” checkbox. They will receive an Asana Inbox notification for every new task added to enable them to triage new tasks added.
Conclusion
Your organization’s Default Workflow is up and running!
Monitor initial usage to ensure you get the expected intra- and inter-team benefits described above.
Thanks for reading,
Larry Berger, Forum Leader, Asana Services Partner, Trilogi Solutions
