I am a new ASANA user and I am after advice about using ASANA to help collaboration on a research program.
We run a large research Program that involves 7 different research organisations (Universities and government agencies). It involves about 80 people across 20 different research projects. Research Projects involve teams of up to 15 people (1-3 project leaders, project staff and clients). Some team members are involved in more than one research project. Each Research project involves a number of substantial Components (experiment 1, experiment 2 etc) and each of these components involves a number of Activities (planning, field logistics, collecting data, analysis, writing reports, presenting the findings) and each of these activities involves a number of Steps (eg writing the reports involves discussing the scope, outlining the content, writing the sub-components, preparing figures and tables etc) and these involve a number of tasks shared among the team.
Program>Research projects>Components>Activities>Steps>Tasks
As a trial, 11 of us who are involved in 2 of our Research rojects that are working in close collaboration have been using the free version of ASANA to try it out. We have created one workspace for the “Program” and within it separate “ASANA projects” for what would be the Activities within a Research project in the scheme above. It’s really quite well but its getting very confusing as we have created a long list of ASANA projects.
We like using it and its helped a lot but I can see two issues.
First issue is that it will get way too confusing once we include all our other Research projects if we continue to have them in the same workspace and allocate each of our activities to an ASANA project. But its great seeing all your tasks in the one area without having to switch across multiple workspaces as there is no global task list that covers multiple workspaces. Any suggestions on how best to set things up in our situation would be appreciated.
The second issue is that we are interested in some of the premium features and our full team across allour projects is more than 15, so we will need to upgrade, but I am not sure about the most cost-effective way of doing this. I could upgrade project leaders in the team and then invite everyone else in the team as a guest? Or do I have to upgrade everyone in our one large workspace, which could end up being 80 people under the current model. Or do we set up a separate workspace for what we call Projects. In that case if the same individual is involved in more than one workspace (so each individual is effectively upgraded several times) , does each workspace have to be upgraded or does the upgrade follow an individual? Note that because we are an .edu we can’t use the organisation feature.
Thanks for your advice!