How to coordinate one Team with several Projects in premium?

Hello everyone,

i wanted to ask you for some advice and best practices/workarounds for my case as i am currently introducing Asana in our company.

Our goals: We want to coordinate our teams with Asana while they work on several projects. The team needs an overview about incoming and ongoing tasks of all projects in a weekly meeting to plan the next week. In addition to that they need all the different projects that might be connected to other teams. This way they can monitor the team and the progress in each project.

What i thought of: I created a project “Team” with every team member as a section and one section “Upcoming tasks”. Now we got a nice view of what each team member is doing at what time. Furthermore you can see all the tasks that are to be done in the future.

The challenge: My solution only works, when every new task is connected to the “Team” project manually. Now, this is not really a solution as people will forget to do so. I was thinking of integrating rules to do the following: Whenever a task in a project is created it will also be created in the project “Team”. Also, whenever a task is given to a person it will be moved to the section with the persons name.

Now as is understand it this would be possible in the business version but we only have premium and as a startup we cannot really afford business.

Do you know any solutions for my case or do you have other ways to get done what we need?

Help is really appreciated. All the best
Flo

Hi @Florian_Bethke, welcome to the community forum and thanks for reaching out!

A subset of Rules are available to Premium customers, you can see the list here. However, the rule Task added to this project → Add to another project is available to Business customers.

@Phil_Seeman, do you know if this is something Florian can achieve with Flowsana?

Thanks, @Emily_Roman and hello, @Florian_Bethke!

Yes, this can be accomplished using Flowsana (with a Premium-level Asana subscription). While Flowsana is a paid subscription, it would likely be less than upgrading your team to Asana Business.

Before I answer in full, two questions for you:

  1. Will you be viewing these projects as a List, Board, Timeline or Calendar?
  2. Will people be assigning tasks immediately as they enter them in the detail projects, or later on after the tasks are created?

Hello @Emily_Roman and @Phil_Seeman,

thanks for your welcome and the super fast answer!

To answer your questions Phil:

  1. Usually the team will view the project as a list and/or as a timeline. We are not really familiar with the calendar function, yet.
  2. We try to create templates and as those projects start, the goal ist to assign every task to a team member. In addition to that it might happen that we create new projects without templates and enter people in ongoing projects. In those cases they will be assigned to their tasks immediately. So, i guess both of your options will happen.

Hi @Florian_Bethke,

I think you could use Flowsana to accomplish what you want, but not with 100% consistency.

First, in the cases where you’re working from templates, you could attach the template tasks to the “Team” project so that new projects created from that template should have the tasks already in “Team”. No rules required here.

You could create one rule for each “detail” project that you want rolled up into the “Team” project: if new task is created, add it to project “Team”. That will work to catch cases where you add new tasks later, after a project has been created from the template.

You could create a rule in the “Team” project for each person: if the project is assigned to “[this person]”, put it in section “[this person]”. This will work great for tasks that were added to the “Team” project from a template, or where the task was initially created without any assignment and then is later assigned.

Where you’ll run into trouble is if you create a task in a detail project and assign it as part of the creation. In those cases, it’s likely that timing-wise, this “move to section” rule won’t fire because by the time the task ends up in the “Team” project (via the “add to project” rule discussed above), the assignment will already have been done and so this rule won’t fire.

I hope the above makes sense; if not, let me know. It’s a bit complicated, I know.

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Hi @Phil_Seeman,

thank you for your help! I think that might work as a perfect solution for us. I will try it and get back in contact.
Thanks again!

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@Florian_Bethke have you considered using a search/report to accomplish this? It is capable of providing tons of different information at the task level. It would also be much easier and require less maintenance than the “Team” project method, and since searches can be saved as reports, you can access the same information each week with a single click.

For example, for your team’s weekly planning meeting:

  1. Save a report for all tasks that exist within the team and are due within the next week or have been created within the last week (this ensures tasks that were created but weren’t assigned or given a due date still show up).
  2. Sort it by Assignee to see what each team member is working on and if people from other teams are doing work on your projects. This is also where you’ll be able to identify tasks that haven’t been assigned yet.
  3. Sort it by Project to give a clear sense of everything related to each of the team’s projects. (You can also limit it to milestones or specific projects for discussing OKRs)
  4. Save a second report that shows other teams’ tasks that are assigned to your team members to get a clear idea of how your team members are working with other teams.

The downside is that searches appear in list form without sections and can’t be viewed as a board or a timeline. They can be viewed as a calendar, however, which can offer a similar overview of when work is being accomplished. (The calendar view lacks dependency mapping and lanes though, so if you’re heavily dependent on those features at the team level it may not work for you.)

Do you think this would help you with your needs?
Russel

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@Russel_Fogg thanks for the advice. I will experiment a little bit and talk to the team leaders to identity the best way for us.

This seems like a good alternative for us.

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@Phil_Seeman and @Russel_Fogg

I tried both of your suggestions and both work!
Thanks a lot, unfortunately i can only mark one as solution.

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