Newbies - how we use asana: is there a better way?

Hi we are a small team trying out asana free version, moving from todoist and microsoft project. We run a lot of projects that may go for a few weeks to a few months.

Our current asana structure examples

Program View


this seems to be a good way to keep track of status of whole program and what stage all the projects are at, at a high level. Each project has milestones as subtasks, each tagged with milestone so we can create a saved report showing upcoming milestones for each PM.

then each PM has their own ‘team’ with their projects and detailed todo lists.
we bring the milestones into that project - task sitting in two places

PM todo list view

At the moment this is seeming like a pretty good structure but its early days. One of the first issues is that we can’t sort tasks by due date within sections so that’s a gotcha. this affects our todo lists for PM’s projects, and the project lists in our Team Milestones. Also subtasks seem to be harder to work with than regular tasks.

Can any more experienced asana users give us some advice on whether this type of structure will work in the long run or whether we should be trying another structure before we get too into this one? any future gotchas that we cant see yet?

i did have a follow up question to asana on my post too.

in this thread, it looks like sections will become containerised meaning sorting by due date should work within each section, as it does for columns in boards.

is there a rough timeline on implementation on this?

It should, but will it be a feature and when are another questions :slight_smile:

Maybe there is a way to use the Milestone feature (a task can be turned into a Milestone). Also using subtasks is often not a really good idea, they have a lot of limitations. If you are willing to go to Business you would have the porfolio (high level view of projects) that would be good for you.

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@Clayton_Chipper, Perhaps have a look at an earlier reply of mine in another thread:

Thanks,

Larry

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