Hi @SimonT - nice to e-meet you! I’m the community manager at Asana. Thanks for your thoughtful post. We have lots to talk about!
I’ll start by saying +1 to @James_Carl’s suggestions for project prefix and custom fields, in addition to saving advanced searches for reporting purposes. I’ll elaborate.
Overall, it seems like what you describe is generally possible in Asana today, with the exception of things like the pop up. That’s a great suggestion! To clarify, you can currently search for and access projects that belong to teams you’re not a member of.
Regarding team setup, I suggest the following:
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You describe your company as having an ops department with 4-6 teams with their own projects. I suggest that you create an Asana team for each team in your ops department. In addition, create an Asana team for your Ops department as a whole for more high level conversations and visibility. This is how we do it on the CS team at Asana. We have a CS team in Asana, but we also have a Customer Ops team in Asana that includes members of CS, Support, Sales, and Marketing.
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To get high level insight into projects for a review meeting, I suggest that (to James’ point) you use Advanced Search, Dashboards, and Status Updates in projects, and the projects themselves. This is what we do at Asana, as well! If I’m going into a meeting to describe what’s happening with the Community program, I’m going to have a tab open with my Community Roadmap project, my most recent status updates, and the progress chart from my Community Roadmap project. I have a practice of giving status updates every couple weeks, so everyone on my team is up to date on my work. This has become especially helpful when I need to remember what I’ve accomplished in the last few months or even the last few weeks!
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…Someone who’s interested in knowing the status of lots of projects on my team - my boss, for example - might leverage the resources I just listed, in addition to a unique Dashboard with all the projects our team is working on. Lastly, we might also save an advanced search for all tasks on the CS team that are due within the next two weeks. I highly recommend advanced search for a truly customized overview of your team’s work.
Please let us know if you have any follow up questions and we’ll be happy to help!