Large-scale, cross-functional projects

English Forum Asana In Practice Asana for Ops & PMO
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Overview
Use Asana to manage large-scale projects(Different definition to Asana projects) involving multiple departments, clients, and partner organizations.

Premise

  • Asana Features: Asana provides a wealth of tools for open, non-hierarchical communication.
  • Real-world organizational features: Internal communication tends to be closed within each department. When interacting with other departments, information about one’s own department is often somewhat exaggerated.

Challenge
To effectively use Asana, a framework is needed that reconciles the open communication style of the platform with the more careful nature of real-world organizational dynamics.

Proposed approach
Imagine a large project where multiple internal departments and external parties are collaborating.

Example configuration:
Participants: The entire organization (including external stakeholders), sales, design, manufacturing, and construction.
Create the following Asana projects:

  1. Overall Project
  2. Sales Project
  3. Design Project
  4. Manufacturing Project
  5. Construction Project

Create a portfolio to summarize your projects and add them to it

Configuration image

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{29F62F04-53E6-4BB1-8D6C-3A0BA4FF60FE}747×640 29.8 KB

Project Assignment Guidelines:

  • Assign the leaders of each department (Sales, Design, Manufacturing, Construction) to the overall project. No members other than the leaders of each department should be assigned to the overall project.
  • Assign only members of each department to each department’s project. Do not include members of other departments.
  • Internal communication within each department should be limited to its own project.

Task Management Strategy:

  • Use Asana’s multi-homing feature to share overall milestones and cross-functional tasks.
  • Do not multi-home tasks that are only relevant to individual departments.

Things to consider:
This setup is complex and requires ongoing maintenance. A deep understanding of Asana’s functionality is essential.

Suggested Features:
Introducing a feature to limit multi-homing (Sharing tasks with other projects) would improve control and transparency.
(Note: https://forum.asana.com/t/intentionally-not-using-multi-home/1080891?u=ka_nishiyama)

I’ll use this post as a reference.
https://forum.asana.com/t/top-tips-on-setting-up-your-teams-in-asana/1077473?u=ka_nishiyama

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Thanks for the call out to my post, @anon60007830
I hope you find it inspiring.

In your case I would always opt for one ‘mega’ project in Asana where every department could see everyone else’s task, unless there are privacy issues, then split into smaller projects but always have a master project to collect all tasks into one, to get the bigger picture.

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@Richard_Sather ,I understand your point of view.

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I’d say I generally agree with @Richard_Sather’s reply:

I see your point in the other thread you posted related to this, but generally prefer to group like things together and then provide views (view tabs, multi-homing, etc.), rather than having things be separate entirely. But my approach could change in a moment learning some specific detail about a unique environment/approach, so it’s nuanced.

Thanks,

Larry

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