I have found some on this topic, but not that I can piece together a solution (if there is one)
We are a small custom job shop (about a dozen of us). (Custom Cabinets) We have been using Asana for about 8 months. I have mixed feelings and not sure where to go from here. If we use list view and each ‘job’ is a Project there are virtually no tools available to manage all the jobs in Process. While this gives us wonderful granular level tasks to complete for each job, there is practically no help in the bigger picture of managing all the jobs in the system. From Initial contact to Completion and customer acceptance. I have used colors, and some manual sorting of the list, but it is huge and far from efficient or visual.
If we use the Board view (which is much like the large magnetic marker board we use to visually track our projects now), and we create a single board and each job becomes a task that moves left to right through our process from (column headers) Contact, Estimate, Design, Proposal, … etc to Completion. It give great visual for the high level!! (Plus all our jobs are on one calendar…yeah!), but it essentially disconnects ‘My Tasks’ from being able to assign to a job, since each one of our jobs is now a ‘task’ and I cannot assign a task to a task, only a project. In order to assign a task to one of these tasks I have to go to each Job (task) and create a sub-task and assign it to a person. Terribly tedious!
IMO, it seems as though Asana is fine for a few larger projects but having a lot (30-60) of complex projects (many steps each job must go through, with different people and departments). Is there an efficient way to do this I am missing? (Provided this all makes sense)
Is there a solution that gives us the board view of our Jobs and keeps everything on one calendar (I have a complex Google calendar that I manage now to do some of this, and the simplistic way that Asana sends out tasks is pretty useless), but gives me the easy MyTask way of adding tasks to our jobs (essentially sub-tasks I guess)?
Perhaps, assuming you are going in the way of custom fields: having the custom field in list view, and attached to every task in each project seems a bit awkward on a good day. Perhaps I don’t really know how to use this feature to it’s full advantage? Having them in a easy to see and change format like the board view is much more intuitive for all our team members, and gives the ability to get a high-level glance quickly. The snip is of our ‘Company Jobs’ board project, where we have put a few projects, primarily from only one of my designers to see if we like this board view better than List view.
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I guess I need to see not just what jobs are at what stage, but also their ‘size’ either by $ amount or ‘box count’ (Bx). The way we label our jobs allows me to see who we are working for the most, so the bulk of the job name is important as well.
Saima,
In short, after much trial and error, we created a very blended approach. We have created Individual projects that cover a ‘range’ of functions, an initial ‘list view’ that is where we record all potential contact info. Very much ‘suspects’, not yet a prospect sometimes. Once we meet the client and begin the Estimating process, that is second project in asana, board view now, with columns showing the big picture job progression through this stage. We use this same format for the subsequent ‘stages’ (Design, final pricing, Engineering, production, etc) The tasks on these boards are our individual ‘jobs’ going through the process. We then us a blend of tags and custom fields to give visual cues on these boards, as well as ensure requisite information gets collected. It has taken about a year for us to hone in on this, but we finally left our large white boards that we used to track big picture job progress just this month.
Think Toyota Production Sytem / Lean Manufactuirng. Keep it visual. Having to go search a bunch of reports is far from ideal. Hopefully the attached screen snips give you a sense of what we are doing. It is still progressing, but the idea is to create immediate status awareness of a given job to both the responsible parties and managers, for any given stage. I am still working on getting the ‘loading’ of our overall resources from this, but I know that I will with this format. I have some wishes for subtask functionality that is addressed elsewhere on here, but this is better than we have had it in the past!
I crammed the last 2 images together. ‘1-Prospective jobs’ board view project from the ‘6-Engineering’ board view. These are 2 samples of what we see when we click on the project in the first image.
