I’d love to hear everyone’s response to this concern I have. First off, yes… I already have searched the community for answers to this question. That’s the problem. Everyone’s answer is relative to them. Which is great! It’s good to Asana helping various industries with their productivity and project management needs.
I run a small healthcare inbound marketing agency. I’m trying to understand if it’s better to separate my clients into “teams” or “projects”. Each client of mine utilizes a full inbound marketing approach. Meaning we deploy several digital marketing channels to help them (seo, social, email, content, etc).
Initially, I created a team for every client. Each client has a “project” for a master list, on-boarding, attract stage, convert stage, close stage, and engage stage.
Is this necessary or overkill?
On the other hand, I was thinking of separating clients into projects. Within the project utilizing custom fields to segment the tasks into “attract” tasks, “convert” tasks, “close” tasks, etc. Again, I’m not really sure how I should set this up.
That’s a great question, @Brandon_Grimes, and one that we see customers accomplish in a variety of ways. One of the most common setups we see is how @crema manages this with Teams for each client, similar to your initial setup. You can see details on how they built this out in the webinar we did with them here: https://asana.com/guide/videos/customer-webinars/clients/crema.
At Augur, we set up all retained clients as their own team, and use a separate team if it’s just a short term project.
Then we use a project for each phase of work (typically the 6x months ahead) and a “Dashboard” project, which holds things like our OKRs, a dynamic agenda for our weekly calls and similar.
This means clients we can be confident clients are sectioned off from one another for privacy, we could take advantage of conversations and Asana Dashboards if we needed to – and they only have to worry about one or two Asana projects (the Dashboard for the latest, including a “roundup” search view that shows them the tasks completed in the last week) and the full project view which shows the 6x months of tasks ahead.
This means we end up using lots of subtasks, but that’s actually fine, so we can keep the details down in the depths a little rather than disturbing clients over every single conversation between ourselves.
Hope this helps – tons more I could say on the topic, should really write up our system at some stage for others to learn from + improve.
@Brandon_Grimes I have an additional question-- are you and your team planning to use Asana internally, or is the client also using Asana? I think @MaxTB’s response is more around clients using the interface as well, but honestly I don’t like clients to get into our Asana projects! I always export their projects as a very pared down CSV so that they don’t get confused or bogged down in project details.
Well, I do not actually work for an agency but for an IT company. Regardless, we faced similar decisions and, like everything in life, the answer is: it depends. How many clients do you have and how many tasks are there per client? Also, how long do you usually have the client actively being worked on in Asana?
We have made the experience that the way you use Asana should be based on how easy it is for you to get a quick overview of your work at all times. So, for example, if you have lots of clients, but each of them only hosts a few tasks at a time, it might be too scattered to use a team per client. If you, like us, have very few individual clients and lots of tasks per client, it makes sense to have a team per client.
I’d be happy to provide further insight if you give me some more details about your requirements. Maybe it even makes sense to not divide your setup by client, but to actually form teams, such as SEO, social, etc.?
Hi Avery! I’d like for the clients to use Asana as well. They don’t necessarily have to; but I want them to have access just so at the end of the contract…they can’t say “you didn’t do this”. I can say we did, and you actually have visibility on that task. =D
Thank you for your response. So like you, we have few clients but a lot of tasks. So I think the ‘team per client’ route is the way to go. Now I just need to figure out how many projects I need and what projects will do which.
From the clients I do have, they either don’t like using Asana or barely use it. So I think to have something like @MaxTB uses ( “dashboard” ) to summarize client OKRs, agendas, calls, would be nice. Maybe priorities that are broken down into (Current, Coming Up, Finalize, Later) like @Crema uses.
It really depends on how much information you would like to give the client access to. Our clients do not have access to Asana. We do, however, have a report set up that we can just run before weekly meetings and use as a basis to discuss the upcoming tasks.
As for your internal use, I’d advise you to work a lot with the feature of having one task belonging to multiple projects. We, for example, structure some projects the following way:
We have one project that contains our backlog. this project contains all the tasks that have to be done.
We have multiple projects for our sprints, into which we copy the tasks from our backlog whenever they become part of a sprint. You could also just use sections for your categories (Current, Coming Up, etc.).
OKRs and stuff like that each gets their own project.
You can make a template for your agenda and then just add a new Agenda-project whenever you have to set up a meeting. You can simply export that for your client as well if you don’t want to give them access to your Asana. Just use the meeting to convert your agenda into minutes and export it after the meeting.
I hope this gave you some ideas already.
Best,
Tom
We use Projects for clients. We considered using a team per client but teams can’t be archived, only deleted, and we don’t want to lose the IP built into each project since clients often are long term and we like to have “Project History” for each client.
Hi Brandon Grimes,
It’s good to know that you are running a healthcare market agency. I think as in my opinion, you should keep your teams and projects separately as it helps to manage easily and keep everything in an organized way. Thank you…
Regardless, we faced similar decisions and, like everything in life, the answer is: it depends. How many clients do you have and how many tasks are there per client? Also, how long do you usually have the client actively being worked on in Asana?