Hi,
Asana introduced workloads a couple of months ago to manage the workload of people. At the same time, I kept seeing the same request: how to do resource management in Asana.
Whether it is for cars, scooters, cameras⊠many businesses need to know which resource is used where and if there are conflicts in allocation.
Let me introduce a new innovative way of managing your resources in Asana using a Business account
Exampleâs context
You are a consulting firm and you have 2 Teslas and a Vespa to go see clients in Paris for whom you organize events. Obviously, you canât have two people using the same vehicle the same day to go to different places.
To simplify, weâll say that people use a vehicle for the entire day (that solution would not work as well with fractions of days).
First step: each resource is a dedicated Asana account
Wait, what? Yes you read me right: each Tesla and the Vespa have a dedicated account. In order to not use paid seats, youâll have to create guest accounts. And to avoid creating dedicated emails addresses, you can use the following trick.
siebmanb@gmail.com is my personal email address. siebmanb+vespa@gmail.com is seen by Asana as a different email address, but Gmail see them as the same. So I can setup the account and manage it myself without creating a new email adress.
For each account, choose a nice picture and a name. Here is a the result.
I know what youâre gonna say. âWe have 50 vehicles, we canât do that!â. Really? Even if that takes 1 minute per vehicle, that is less than an hour to setup something youâll use on a daily basis.
Assign tasks to vehicles
Then, whatever your system is, you need to start assigning tasks to vehicles with due dates. For example on a clients project, if you have a task for a meeting, you can have a subtask for transportation like âGo to meetingâ which you assign to the Tesla Model X for Monday.
bis: Alternative with a transportation project
Alternatively, you can create a project to manage transportation and multi-home tasks there. The project could give you access to custom fields such as the constraint you have for the vehiculs. For example, even if you book the Tesla Model X, you could setup the proper custom fields to say that what you actually need is a 2-seat vehicle, allowing the resource manager to switch you with something else.
Here is the project. As you can see in the projectsâ list, I also have a repair project so I assign vehicles for their annual or recurring repairs.
And now, the magic
Create a portfolio with the Transportation project OR every single project managing vehicles. And you get a nice resource management view
We can see that the Vespa has been booked by someone to go an expo, and also to meet a client team. But the annual visit at the repair shop happens at the same time. By drag and dropping tasks between different vehicles, you can manage your entire fleat. Employees just need to check their Asana on the day they need their vehicles and see which one was assigned to them based on their constraints. And if you add a driver name custom field in the transportation project, each employee can build a custom report to see all the tasks assigned to a vehicle they are supposed to drive.
How does that look? Could that be useful to your company?