The votes have been casted, results are in! But first, a few words about the award.
The organization: the jury was made of 20 Asana “experts” around the world: Asana Together team members, Asana Certified Pros, 3rd party developers… Each user submission was made through an Asana Form that created a task in a project. Each jury member had access to a dedicated custom field containing 5 values: 1 pt, 2 pts, 3 pts, 4pts, 5pts. They were tasked with using each value once to vote on projects.
The prizes: each of the three winners will receive a special prize, mentioned below. Each participant will receive a free “Best of Templana” templates bundle and the ebook “Secrets of Successful Teams in Asana”
1st Shared and dynamic team meetings
From: Julien Renaud and its team at Comap
Bio: In fact, MY bio should be OUR bio. For 2 reasons, first you already know me as a Forum Champion, but second: because a team project doesn’t make sense without a team. All of us use Asana on a daily basis and are always looking for technical but also organisational innovation. This project is a result of that. Bertrand, Guillaume, Hervé, Yann, Antonin & Julien A french R&D team.
Description: It all started with the following observation: team meetings were less dynamic and sometimes even “boring”… so we had to change something, shake up our habits!
One year later, the new format is unanimously approved by the team.
What have we changed?
- the duration is not fixed and never exceeds 1 hour,
- the agenda is co-constructed upstream and is thus known to all,
- each project manager makes a very quick point to focus on discussions and questions.
But THE biggest novelty is this: the person in charge of the meeting changes every week! And the team leader no longer leads the meeting!
So :
- everyone feels involved and takes ownership of the meeting,
- it brings change every time because everyone leads in their own way,
- responsibility becomes collective because it is no longer systematically the manager who leads.
Thus, the meeting is no longer the meeting of the manager to whom we report one by one, it is a moment of exchange, collaboration,… In short, it has become a real TEAM meeting!
And Asana allows us to easily organize all this!
In table mode:
- Project members = team members, in order to have notifications when topics are added to be discussed,
- One column a week,
- A task containing all the team members’ photo is duplicated each week, and is placed at the top of the column. The image to be displayed is then chosen with the drop-down menu “Choose cover image” by selecting the first name. This way, the facilitator of the meeting is chosen for the next meeting and has the role of making sure that everything goes well.
- Once the meeting is over, we move the column to the right of the “Completed meetings” column, and so on week after week …
In this way, we have somehow hijacked the option of changing the cover image, which is often used only once, into an action that we carry out every week.
Clear, collaborative, efficient, shared!
Note from the jury member @Bastien_Siebman: this project took the contest by storm! The votes from the jury were overwhelming. A rotating facilitator for meetings is a great idea, implement it in Asana makes it even better. And use the “choose a cover image” feature for this use case is just perfect!
Prizes: a $50 Asana swag store coupon, a free year of any Unito plans, one year free of Flowsana, a 30-minute screen-shared session with Asana Certified Pro @lpb, a bundle of all Templana templates
2nd Weekly Ballet Class Template
From: Lucy McLachlan
Bio: A business management consultant helping creatives and sole consultants build flow out of structure.
Description:
Ballet studios are generally fairly archaic in their management and administration practices. They rely on face-to-face communication, printed rolls, cash payments and scribbled post-it notes about student updates, costumes, fees and all the rest. At best they use a clunky and expensive piece of software, that only the receptionist knows how to use.
As a remote studio manager, I wanted to bring our ballet school into the 21st century. I was already working with Asana with other clients and thought I could easily adapt it to manage enrollments and invoicing for the studio. From here, the opportunities to use Asana in other areas of the business became immediately clear. We integrated Asana with Squarespace through an excel import to seamlessly manage online enrollment. We set up a Admin Office space that contains all the resources our Faculty and staff need day-to-day. We created projects and timelines for events and deliverables.
But this is by far my favorite project, because it took a bunch of creatives who HATE admin from being admin slugs to admin queens. This project is used as the template from which our Weekly Class projects are created. Here, teachers manage the rolls for their classes. They can also plan lessons, take notes, upload music and videos, and collaborate with other teachers. All they have to do is open the app on their phone, jump into their class and tick off their roll. This project kickstarted so much creative dialogue about lesson plans, students and choreography. It is also helping us manage our response to COVID-19 and potential transition to online classes.
Note from the jury member @Bastien_Siebman: this project is also a clear winner, with overwhelming praise from the jury. Jury members loved the story behind the template and noted the clever use of Kanban view to use as a calendar!
Prizes: a $30 Asana swag store coupon, 6-month free of Flowsana, an email exchange consultation/Q&A with Asana Certified Pro @lpb, a bundle of all Templana templates
3rd My digital professional brain
From: Nicolas Gron
Bio: Minimalist Padawan…I’m at the very beginning of my Asana experience. Full of hope, I’m willing to rely on this “digital brain” to save precious time!
Description:
My project is so cool I just cannot do without it. Everything is made to make my life (and my job) easier.
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I quickly create a new task
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I simply add a stage (Etat) and a tag (Etiquette) to that task
→ my task automatically goes to the desired section and will move to the different stages during its lifespan until it is marked as done!
No more stress! I only pay attention to the things I need to focus on! 
Note from the jury member @Bastien_Siebman: the jury was very impressed with that advanced system of tasks going through stages. I personaly love the combination of emojis, colored custom fields and due dates, sorted by one custom field.
Prizes: a $15 Asana swag store coupon, an email exchange consultation/Q&A with Asana Certified Pro @lpb, a bundle of all Templana templates
We hope you all enjoyed those submissions as much as we did! In the upcoming days, I’ll share all the other submissions!