How to setup asana for vendor projects?

Hello everyone! We are just starting to evaluate asana and one area that I am looking for help on is around working with external vendors. I am trying to see what the best “set-up” would be for asana to keep track of projects they are working on for me, but I do not need the details per say.

For example, I have a vendor that is responsible for our website updates, changes, etc. I might ask them to look into creating a new way to display news on the main page. Overall this is a project for them, and me as well, but I do not need to know all of the tasks required to get that done. Additionally, they might have around a dozen different projects assigned to them in various stages: ideas, in process, on hold, etc. Again I do not need to know the details, I just need to know how the projects are moving along.

So my question is do I bring them into a team and have a list of projects, that might not have any tasks per say, or do I just create a project board and all of the projects are viewed as task cards?

Just curious what others have done with regard to external vendors doing projects?

2 Likes

Hi @Will

First call out what I am suggesting below may not work as I have not tried it.

Assuming you control the projects that you Assign to the Vendors, you would create a basic shell project with key tasks/milestones that you want to be updated on. eg. draft ready, demo available etc. You would then add then to a Project that you owned or was your Management Project. They could then update with Due Date, commentary on Status etc. You would be notified each time an update is made.

Back in their project they could add tasks as they like without you have to worry about (as long as you took yourself off as follow of the project). They could even mention you in comments if they wanted to let you know something or even assign a task to you eg. “Pay Invoice” :slight_smile:

The thing you will need to work out is how to create your organisation/team structure to work with multiple Vendors and what you want them to be able to see etc.

Hope this helps.

Jason.

2 Likes

Hi Will!

Aisling from the Asana Customer Success team here.

I’ve seen teams effectively work with vendors and here’s what I’d recommend.

*Vendor can be guests in your Asana which can allow you to have multiple vendors in your space without them having access to each other’s projects. More on guests here: Workspace basics | Product guide • Asana Product Guide

  • In general, as @Jason_Woods stated above, I’d recommend adding them at the project level instead of the team level. In your example, set up a “Website Updates” project and add your vendor as a Project member Setting Up a Project in Asana | Product Guide • Asana Product Guide sharing only this project with them. Make sure your own member notification settings are only for the Conversations and Status Updates if you’re not interested in every single task update

  • Communicating what you want to be updated on will be key and you can do this by assigning the vendor a task or starting a conversation. Then ask for any updates to be posted in the Progress tab of the project.

  • A convention for managing multiple vendors in your Asana could be to have the vendor name in brackets tagged onto the beginning or end of the project name [“shared with XYZ Vendor”]

I hope that helps!

Cheers,
Aisling

3 Likes

I am a product manager, and I develop new product with many different vendors. I want to use 1 dedicated product development template for all suppliers, but have Asana auto assign each vendor task to whichever supplier that project is given to. I only want that vendor included in the project, not all. As of today, on my template, I’m leaving the vendor tasks’s assignee unassigned, and I manually add the assignee depending on which supplier I’m working with, but I am looking for an automated solution. Does a solution exist for this?

Depending on your plan, you could

  • Use the project template Roles feature to be assign project template tasks to “Vendor” then be prompted to assign that “Vendor” role to the known Assignee for all tasks when you instantiate the project
  • Use a custom field to mimic the above and rules to do similarly
  • Use a tag and do the above manually, but in a multi-select batch.

You’ll manually need to make the vendor a project member, probably.

Hope that helps,

Larry