Hi there. I work for a professional services firm that primarily does custom software development. We’re looking to switch to using Asana for project management, and I’m trying to think through how to deal with client communication.
We like the Conversation stream, and we’d envision that as one of the primary ways we’d communicate about non-task related items with clients. It’s nice to have it consolidated in one place rather than sifting through a bunch of email chains.
When it comes to tasks, though, we may not always want all of those tasks and their comments to be public. The only way that I can think of handling this is having a client-facing Asana project and then an internal Asana project. This just makes me worry about possible double-entry of tasks (from one board to another) and the volume of projects we’ll start building up.
I did play around with NOT adding a client to a project and then individually assigning tasks to them - that sort of works, but it doesn’t solve the conversations part, because those conversations look like they’ll just get lost in the Inbox stream…
Thank you in advance!
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Your public + private projects is a good idea. You can have public tasks in both and private tasks only in one. No need for double entries: a task can live into multiple projects (it is called multi homing). Would that solve your problem?
Also for a given task that needs to be private (« Design new logo ») but you still need to discuss with the client, you can create a task called « Design new logo - Discussions », use the comments to discuss and in the task description you can @-mention the private task for easy access (client will see a private inaccessible link, but you won’t). In the public task you can @-mention the private task for easy access to the public task.
Does it make sense?
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@Jessica_Kwok: Our company is somehow running the same business. So far Asana is not a customer facing system as we do have a ticket system on top that connects with Asana internally. We automatically “move” tickets between the ticket system and Asana. That’s very handy. The main reason is that we want to clearly separate external from internal communication.
We just started to invite customers and partners to our Asana instance. We created dedicated projects for those and use a color schema to identify them. However we would not want to share the same task for internal and external communication to prevent us from doing mistakes.
Hope this helps,
Patrick
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@Bastien_Siebman @Patrick_Lorenz thanks for the great tips! I’ll look into your suggestions.
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At the company I work, we used to have internal (IN) and external (EX) projects for the exact same purpose, but with time we decided to simplify itby making all projects open to clients but use IN and EX tasks when needed: we connect both by having the link for the IN task in the description of the EX task, but gave no persmission for the clients to see it (they see a private link), and everytime there is an update in the IN task worthy of being reported to the client, we post it in the EX tasks.
As for longer and more detailed IN conversations , we have them in the Conversations module in the teams, not in the projects.
It has been working fine so far. =)
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@Gustavo_Carvalho thanks for sharing! Can you explain more how you have private tasks (IN tasks) yet still keep all projects open? Where exactly do those IN tasks live?
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I dont get it 
Screen share video?
Basically you can have two projects: one public for the client, and one private for you. Each each project you can have the same tasks list. In the public project you only discuss with the client, in the private you attach files, assign people, due date…
To explain it, I’ll use 2 different projects as examples:
- PRODUCT FEEDBACK (which is IN, clients won’t have access to it)
- CLIENT PROJECT (which is public for clients)
Whenever a client gives a feedback about our product, we create a task in it, let’s call it [IN] Feddback and store it in PRODUCT FEEDBACK. If it is necessary for the client to keep up with it somehow, we create another task called [EX] Feedback, store it in CLIENT PROJECT and link the [IN] Feedback task in the task description.
As the client doesn’t have access to the project PRODUCT FEEDBACK, the task [IN] Feedback will be shown as a private link that the team consults when needed. =)
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Has anyone requested an update for Asana functionality so tasks can be marked view only without duplicating efforts? Seems like a challenge to track real timeline progress with updating dates and deliverables. Our team uses Internal + External Project lists and it seems like Wrike/Financial Force solve for this better.
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