We replaced half of our Slack channels with Asana

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We replaced half of our Slack channels with Asana, and it felt good! :star_struck:

When we initially started iDO, we did everything in Asana.

But we were keeping WhatsApp on the side for urgent communication. When one of our first employee joind, he was like “this is weird, Whatsapp is a personal tool :confounded_face:”. So we decided to switch to Slack (the free version).

Overtime, we did exactly what our own clients do:

They start doing more and more in Slack. And even though we trained people on how to use Slack, some of them were confused. Information got lost.

So we recently decided to give Asana a new chance when it comes to communication. Here’s what we did.

:backhand_index_pointing_right:t3: We completely removed some Slack channels. Any channel without a message in the last 3 months is basically useless.

:backhand_index_pointing_right:t3: We replaced some channels with Direct Messages in Slack.

:backhand_index_pointing_right:t3: We replaced some channels with projects in Asana.

This last part is interesting, because we decided to leverage three different features in Asana:

:high_voltage: A status update in the project would be used for important communication

:love_letter: A message in the project would be used to share a quick info that did not need to be discussed or kept

:round_pushpin: A task would be created to have discussions and possibly archive the results

For now, it is working pretty well! :grinning_face:

It doesn’t look like Asana will be able to replace Slack soon, but I feel like we are on the right track to finding a healthy balance :balance_scale:

How do you organise your internal communications? :blush:

Bastien, Asana Expert
iDO (Asana Partner: Services & Licenses)

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I’ll use this as reference. :smile:
In our case, we refer to slack as teams, but is it okay to think of them as the same thing?

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Same thing indeed!

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It’s a good question. Oftentimes, we use private message apps like slack to a faster form of communication when we are working synchronously on a time sensitive project. But sometimes the reason is to keep a comment related to a task private and not viewable by all others - for example, a client - in the project space. In this latter use case, my preference would be to add a comment to the task but simply mark my comment as private so that it can only be viewed by the person I @ mention or only viewed by Members. But I do not know of any project management app that supports this functionality where some comments in relation to a single task can be private. Perhaps the use case is too atypical for others but for us it is very typical. And it creates a problem because then we have to create a separate comment thread in slack thus creating 2 different & disconnected - for all intents and purposes - comment streams in relation to a single task.

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Hi, @Hugh_Macken .
This is a very interesting topic.
As a rough comment, the following relationships can be considered.

  • When multiple departments (including departments outside the organization) are working on one project (not an Asana project).

  • For example, in the case of customers (overall), sales, design, and production departments. Create four Asana projects. Create one portfolio to combine the four projects.

  • To each project, assign only members related to that project. To the customer (overall) project, assign the customer and the leaders of each related department. To the sales department project, assign sales people and leaders of other departments. To the design department project, assign design people and leaders of other departments. To the production department project, assign people related to production and leaders of other departments. No one other than the leaders of each department should be assigned to other departments. To the customer (all) project, assign non-leaders with view-only access.

  • Communication within each project will be limited to each project.

To @Bastien_Siebman
I think there are some parts that are different from the original post’s theme.
If you think this should be moved to a different thread, please let me know.
(I don’t know how to move this to another thread.)

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