Manage resources like a boss 😎 in Asana: meeting rooms, cars, camera...

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 :drum:

:zero: Example’s 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 can’t have two people using the same vehicle the same day to go to different places.
To simplify, we’ll say that people use a vehicle for the entire day (that solution would not work as well with fractions of days).

:one: 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, you’ll 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.

Capture d’écran 2020-08-01 à 15.09.53

I know what you’re gonna say. “We have 50 vehicles, we can’t do that!”. Really? Even if that takes 1 minute per vehicle, that is less than an hour to setup something you’ll use on a daily basis.

:two: 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 “Go to meeting” which you assign to the Tesla Model X for Monday.

:two: 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 projects’ list, I also have a repair project so I assign vehicles for their annual or recurring repairs.

:three: 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 :champagne:

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?

22 Likes

5 stars! I think this is awesome.

And this tidbit:

WHOAAAAAAA!! :astonished:

6 Likes

Great post, @Bastien_Siebman!

You didn’t mention it, but I see you used the “Role” field (in My Profile Settings) so that’s why “Car” appears in the first Workload column. One can also use Role to filter the view, just like you can filter by person/user, so you could see just cars or scooters easily.

In case anyone was wondering, the user+extra@gmail.com trick also works for many email systems, not just gmail.

Great!

Larry

3 Likes

This is awesome @Bastien_Siebman once again your contribution to this Community is top notch


:clap::clap::clap::medal_sports:

I just wish I had a use case and business account to implement it


Jason.

3 Likes

Thanks guys! I forgot to mention, and that would have been a better example probably, but that works great for meeting rooms at a company’s HQ!

Thanks a lot, Larry, I wasn’t sure about this, but you are right! @Phil_Seeman I know, that is a mind-blowing trick. I am thanking my colleagues at whoz.com for teaching me this. (They also taught me that date sorting can be done by alpha sorting a date formatted as YYYY-MM-DD :grimacing:)

Funny you mentioned it because I never used Role before and I did for that example a couple of days ago after reading one of your message!

We should start building companies around Asana feature and trics we want to use :man_facepalming::grimacing:

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Yes, that’s an excellent point, and as you say, probably even more relevant to a lot of companies (or at least, will be once people return to those HQs).

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Yes, for full-day reservations, but have you worked out a good protocol for multiple reservations by time of day?

Update: I’ve addressed time-based resource management in this alternative, simplified approach:

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Congrats on another fantastic post @Bastien_Siebman :clap:t3:

Great post, @Bastien_Siebman!

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After many first times, I have seen a good implementation of GMAIL’s Plus addressing in business scenario. Awesome implementation. There are now multitude of ways we could use Gmail’s Plus Addressing. Way to go @Bastien_Siebman

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Awesome! @Bastien_Siebman

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This was a great tip. Really appreciate it!

if you are using GSuite (or other paid email solutions), you can create aliases to any email like so: tesla@yourdomain.com and porche@yourdomain.com . In GSuite you can also use myname+tesla@yourdomain.com the same way you can use that with the free gmail.

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True, but as they’re is no connection with all your colleagues Google accounts for example, aren’t we reinventing the wheel for something Google Cal can already do?

Fantastic use of the email+X@gmail.com technique that I thought was only great to identify websites selling your data to SPAM senders :slight_smile:
And less useful here, but FIY, this Gmail technique works also with dots (eg. arthurbegou@gmail.com comes with aliases such as arthur.begou@gmail.com or another one art.hur.begou@gmail.com)

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I did not know dots worked as well :heart:

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