🛠 Did you consider having a handyman in Asana?

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I believe being “proactive” in Asana is the next step in productivity. You know what would be awesome? In a company, having a “handyman” that can go around, search for stuck tasks or full plates, and help people out. How awesome would that be? Do you believe that could exist? How would that role be called?

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Think this would be very beneficial for a company. Almost like a Asana Generalist.
Would love to hear others thoughts on this.

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I want to emphasize it has nothing to do with being good at Asana, this is just someone using Asana to track down work that needs help.

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I think this is really dependent on what work the company does. If the work involves a high level of expertise and/or knowledge specificity, it could be tough to pull off and might be detrimental in the end.

Expertise specificity example: say it’s a software company. One team is working on a new machine learning feature, and they are behind schedule, with overdue tasks. It would be tough for someone without AI training/experience to come in and help get those tasks completed.

Knowledge specificity example: say it’s a management consulting form, where each team is assigned to a large client and works on organizational-change initiatives at that client, and one team is behind schedule. It would be tough for someone outside the team, who doesn’t have any knowledge of that client, its players, and its organizational dynamics, to come in and work on tasks within that team.

Does this make sense; or perhaps you’re thinking of it differently than I am?

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@Phil_Seeman I definitely agree with you. You nailed it with the dependencies of expertise and knowledge specificity. if I were to label someone as a “handyman” in Asana I would expect that person to have a wide range of knowledge with both Asana and the business they are supporting. That is just my interpretation of this label, but I do see value in someone with the sole responsibly of helping get tasks unstuck.

Professional titles that come to mind with both of these distinctions might be:

  • Project Assistant/Coordinator (Asana Generalist I like but to me it draws attention to the platform rather than the process)
  • Process Improvement Analyst/Specialist
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What I had mostly in mind was things like organize a meeting, get two people in the room, go ask the marketing department something face to face, pop up during the IT daily meeting to ask a status update
 Basically facilitating. In software companies doing scrum, the scrum master does not code or talk to the client, he just facilitate things.

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I think I fill a role that fits that description! I am the Traffic Coordinator for the Creative Services team within the Marketing department. I essentially act as a project manager for our content writers and graphic designers to process requests for new or updates assets, assign tasks within Asana, manage workload, and analyze assets and workload.
I keep up with projects, ensuring things stay on track and making sure the team has all of the resources needed to complete the tasks. I reassign or acquire approvals as needed, and tag tasks based on their type and characteristics.

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Thanks Kelly for sharing your role :slight_smile:

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I do agree with @Phil_Seeman because for many tasks or projects special knowledge is key.
Somebody that has a full overview and knowledge on everything that is ongoing.

However for general „Asana cleaning“ or chasing team members it can just be a VA for example.
We have one VA that would login via one admin Asana user that has access to all our projects and teams and can check who has a lot of overdue tasks, which project has a lot of overdue, etc
They‘d also check when team members logged into Asana for the last time (Is especially important for new team members to monitor and ensure they use Asana daily and add all their tasks)

Yes in general this should not happen when you have rules set up that trigger overdue and notify the task/project owners but well let‘s say some people need a „special reminder“ :wink:

The VA would then ping the relevant team members to notify them to update their Asana tasks and they would notify the relevant project owners to update tasks in the project they lead.

Now this VA would also keep reports of when which extra reminders were needed and would escalate further if no action is being taken.

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Thanks Andrea for your contribution. With your VA you basically described what we put together as 🧭 The Asana admin compass

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