Man, could I talk for days about Asana. #nerdalert
Asana is a team collaboration platform that can be used for remote team members to communicate about specific tasks, follow the progress, check off items from a to-do list, assign other group members tasks, and so much more. The idea, in team collaboration mode, is to cut down on emails and make everything easily searchable, and conversations trackable back to projects.
In this particular case study, I used Asana in a different way, for my own organization. When I worked for a small independent label with minimal staff but a full roster, I had to wear many, many hats. Like these: Project Management | Logistics + Day To Day Operations | Social Media | Art + Web Design | Label Outreach and Branding | Marketing | Advertising | Retail Support. I was not only in charge of keeping all those things working, I was also all of those departments. In order to keep everything going, not completely drown in to-do lists and also have a transparent workflow that my co-workers could follow and check in on, I used Asana as my external brain. I setup a project for each artist, each release, and sections within each of those projects. I also set up projects for each of my different "hats." Within each release project, then, I would assign tasks with due dates and also connect them to the particular project they belonged to (like social media or manufacturing).
By cross-referencing the release, artist and type of work and also setting to-do dates, I could look at my work flow in a number of ways. First, by release I could see an overview of all the tasks due for that particular release, across all the areas of the business. Second, I could choose to look at an overview of all the tasks I had due in any one area, like retail support, advertising or art & design. And finally, I could look at the main team calendar, and day by day, see color-coded to-do lists that pertained to both releases and work-types. So, if an item was, say, colored both blue & red and on my “to-do” list for today - I could tell at a glance that the artwork for the new Fruit Bats album is due today. And I could click into the task to see any notes, feedback, attached files or external links that pertained to the task. All in one spot, no searching.