Archive for the ‘Best Practices’ Category
Every step
by Justin Rosenstein
October 27th, 2011
When I walk through a beautiful building, the first thing I experience is the emotional effect of the finished product: a sense of grandeur, or a feeling warmth. But my appreciation grows deeper when I consider how the building was made, to look at every brick or every bolt placed one by one by a person, and then to imagine the architects and designers, who must have thought and debated and iterated on each piece, from the largest design decisions to the smallest details. It’s humbling to stand there, physically held by the fruit of their collective labor.
Lao-Tzu observed that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But the journey is the million steps that follow, and the experience that emerges along the way. That’s how great things are built as well: from skyscrapers to software, from cinema to cities, greatness happens one step at a time. These steps are the “tasks”, the atomic units of work, the building blocks of all effort.
Breaking down ambitious goals into small pieces, assigning ownership of those tasks, and tracking them to completion is how creation happens. The tasks may be complex, interdependent, and involve passionate conversation among many contributors. Their coordination is crucial to the success of a project’s vision.
Everyone knows this and yet, astoundingly, most teams don’t yet have a unified, trusted record of what they have to do. There are project management apps galore, and “enterprise-grade collaboration platforms” are big business, but none of them are good enough at addressing teams’ real-life needs; almost no one’s using them to drive hour-to-hour work (even when they’re paying for them).
Some companies have felt the need for a centralized internal task list so acutely that they’ve built them in-house: Apple has their legendary Radar system, Facebook their collaborative “Tasks” tracker that Dustin and I had the privilege of helping to design and prototype. But in general, good tools for staying in sync just haven’t been built and made available to the world. Teams are getting by on a hodge-podge of email, spreadsheets, physical notebooks, and untracked verbal commitments. And the important conversations and files about those tasks are spread out, disconnected, and out of context.
We see this as the fundamental challenge to the rising productivity of teams. Working together in concert more smoothly not only helps us move more quickly; it changes the nature of what we can undertake. When we have the confidence that we can orchestrate the group effort required to realize them, we dare bigger dreams.
How we use Asana for Bug Tracking
by Jackie Bavaro
August 10th, 2011
One of our design goals with Asana is to find the right balance of structure to streamline work without getting in your way. This lets us adapt to a wide variety of project types and processes.
While there are a lot of process-specific tools for each individual type of data, we believe that the separation of data across multiple systems increases the “work about work”. We can get work of all kinds done better, with less friction, by keeping everything in one place.
For example, we use Asana as a bug tracker. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a dedicated bug tracker, but we’ve found that we get more value out of seeing our bugs with the rest of our tasks like new feature work and writing up interview feedback. This allows me to look in one place for all the things I have to do today, and everyone from our engineers to our recruiter can be sure I won’t miss their tasks.
This week’s video shows how we track bugs in Asana.
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One of the things that makes Asana powerful is how versatile it can be. For example, while Asana isn’t designed specifically to be a bug tracker, we use it internally to track bugs, and we find that the benefits of being able to report bugs quickly, track conversations easily, and keep everything in one place outweigh the benefits we’d get from maintaining a dedicated bug tracking system. Here’s how we use Asana for bug tracking.
We use Priority Headings to mark the priorities of bugs. To create a priority heading, just end the task name with a colon. You can use the keyboard shortcut command-shift-down to quickly jump the bugs into the right priority. We use the section at the top above the first priority heading for new bugs that need to be prioritized.
When anyone finds a bug, they can add it to the unprioritized section. An easy way to do this is to press Tab+Q from anywhere in Asana. This opens the Quick Add dialog so you can add a bug without switching lists. It’s a good idea to put repro steps in the notes field.
Have one person who is in charge of prioritizing new bugs. They should follow the Bugs list, so they get notified when new bugs come in. If you need more information to prioritize the bug, ask in the comment of the bug and leave it in unprioritized until you know more.
You can use tags to help find related bugs. For example we have tags for bugs that only appear in Firefox, and bugs that are related to the details pane. If I want to see all of the bugs about the details pane I can click on the filter and see just those bugs, along with the priorities.
We show dependencies by putting a bug lower and linking to the dependency. The link will automatically show the name of the bug.
If we want to tie the bug to the code, we add a link to the code change in the bug.
To see what’s assigned to each person, click on the group by assignee button. This is also an easy way to find bugs that aren’t assigned.
If you want to track the bugs you created, or bookmark some bugs to keep an eye on them, you can add a private tag. The tag only appears for you, and you can filter to just show those bugs.
For workflow, if you just want Open, Assigned, Started and Fixed, you don’t need to do anything – the view naturally shows which tasks are Open vs. Completed, and when tasks are Assigned and Marked as Today. If you would like to add additional states, like “Needs Verification”, you can use tags. The Project description is a good place to put instructions on which tags to use.
Best Practices: Individual Task Management
by Jackie Bavaro
August 1st, 2011
Asana is helpful not only for keeping your team on the same page, but also for keeping you organized as a person. Many of us are big fans of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, and we implement it using Asana.
Following up on last week’s best practices for project management, here’s a new video about how I use Asana to keep myself organized.
We hope these techniques are valuable to you even if you’re not part of a team that’s using Asana, but maybe even more important if you are: by being the right place for individuals to track tasks day-to-day, Asana becomes more reliable and up-to-date as the source of truth for the projects those individuals are on.
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I love to keep myself organized with Asana. Here’s a little about how I use Asana for my individual task management. If you’ve read Getting Things Done by David Allen, a lot of this will look familiar.
First, I make a habit of writing everything down in Asana. Writing things down gets them off my mind and makes me more relaxed. The fastest way to do this is to go to Assigned to Me and start entering tasks in the Upcoming section. Another way is to forward emails to x@mail.asana.com. When I’m creating tasks for myself, I don’t split them into projects unless I’m working on them with other people. Projects work best for collaborative tasks, otherwise my list can get unwieldy.
People on my team rely on me to be responsive, so I like to always keep my New Tasks section empty. As I clear my New Tasks section, I immediately do any task that takes less than 2 minutes so they don’t build up.
For all other tasks, I make sure they have a clear “next action”. For example, I need to update our metrics report, but the real next action is to write definitions for each of our metrics.
Keeping track of tasks I’ve delegated, I created a private tag called Waiting For and added it to my favorites Now I can tag any tasks that I want to watch with Waiting For. Since the tag is private, other people won’t see it, even if they can see the task.
A daily and weekly review help keep me organized. I spend a little time at the beginning of each day to review my open tasks and pick a few for Today. If my Upcoming list has gotten too long, I’ll take old tasks and mark them as “Later” to take them out of my upcoming view.
Once a week I do a longer weekly review. This is my time to look at all of my projects and clean up anything that’s gotten messy or out-of-date over the week. An easy way to do this is to go through the tasks in my assigned-to-me list, and then to go through each of my projects in the project list, including tasks in Waiting For and Later.
Do you have any best practices for individual task management? Share them with other Asana Members.
Best Practices: Using Asana for Project Management
by Jackie Bavaro
July 19th, 2011
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately talking with businesses who rely on Asana for organizing their workflow. One thing we hear over and over is that as people use Asana more, they constantly discover best practices and conventions for more effectively managing their projects.
Not surprisingly, we’ve spent a lot of time at Asana working to maximize our efficiency and effectiveness, so I made a video about how we use Asana at Asana. We hope some of these tips are helpful to you in managing your own projects. (And if you haven’t already seen How to use Asana, in 2 Minutes, that’s a good video to watch first.)
Best practices for individual task management coming soon!
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Project Management is easy with Asana. Here are a few strategies and tips based on our own internal usage.
Start planning with a high level roadmap. Think about the major goals, milestones and releases for the next year or two.
Then move to medium level planning. At Asana, we think about what work needs to be done for the current release and how to split it into 2 week segments, called sprints.
Then get into the detailed project planning. Have each team turn their list of features & requirements into a complete set of detailed tasks. Then estimate how long each task will take. Try to split the work into tasks that take no more than half a day and can be done by a single person.
Organize the tasks into one Asana project per team, so each person can work out of a single project and not be distracted by irrelevant tasks. Have each team member follow their project so they’ll get notified when tasks are added.
Use Priority Headings to break the work up into sprints, upcoming milestones and backlog. You can create a heading by ending the task name with a colon. You can drag & drop to move tasks into a milestone. If there are important dependencies, you can link to the task by copying its URL and pasting it in the comments.
More Techniques
When a team member makes progress or has questions, add relevant teammates to the followers and comment on the task. Have discussions in the comments, and then update the notes with the current decisions. This way a new person can start working out of the notes which will always be up-to-date.
Add new tasks to the top of the project above the first heading to indicate that they haven’t been prioritized yet. Give one person on the team the role of project owner. The project owner prioritizes the new tasks each day.
Link to mockups and spreadsheets so that you can always find the current version. If you need subtasks you can put them in the notes.
Completed tasks show up at the top of the project, so you can see as progress is made. You can put estimates in the task name so that at the end of a sprint, you can add up the estimates from the completed tasks to see how accurate your forecasts were or calculate your velocity.
Then, at the end, you can archive the tasks in celebration.
Have you found any best practices for project management? Let us know at feedback@asana.com