Hello, I’m fairly new to Asana, primarily using it as a To-Do list for myself, and have been tasked with being my agency’s “Superuser.” The first task I’m trying to tackle is to set up our New Employee Onboarding through Asana.
Our Onboarding process is handled by several different people, each with their own tasks. Currently, we use a four-sheet Excel spreadsheet, with sheets being assigned to the responsible person. However, short of having a meeting to get the ball rolling, several meetings to check the status, and multiple phone calls and side discussions, it is difficult to monitor the process. Additionally, the head of our agency is often very much out of the loop. I think Asana would be a great way to tackle this, but I’m not sure how to go about it, short of manually entering every single task. There has to be a better way. HELP!
Welcome to the forum and you are in for a treat.
What you are after is easy to achieve and you can easily see the rewards of it as well.
There are several ways to tackle onboarding, but I think you way you described seems to be working for you (in terms of who does what), so you can build on that.
Create a blank project
Create a custom field called Responsible department - make it a single select and list the departments involved
Upload your excel file file to it - or if column A are all the tasks required by Person X to do, then copy these cells and paste them in Asana
Assign the custom field for the department relevant to those tasks
Repeat the above 2 steps for each of the sheets in your excel file
Once the set up is ready, go ahead and assign the tasks for each of the department owner responsible to complete these tasks.
This is the simplest way to get you going without overwhelming you and your users.
Please note that are plenty enhancements you can adopt. For example:
Make this onboarding project a template (so you do not have to create the tasks every time)
Allocate dependencies - if one task cannot start before another, this will be visible on the project
In the template, allocate due dates for each task - this helps you to have task one starts on day 1, task 2 on day 5, task 3 on day 15, etc… depending on your workflow.