Skyscrpr + Asana = ♥
We’re jumping into the deep end of the pool, expanding our team to meet the overwhelming demand for Skyscrpr. I wrote up a quick document on how we use Asana at Skyscrpr to keep everybody on the same page.
How does your team use Asana? Have any tips?
(I’ll keep this post up-to-date as we evolve this document.)
Skyscrpr + Asana = ♥
A guide to using Asana as a member of Team Skyscrpr
Projects
Projects are used for every discrete ‘chunk’ of the application. Examples:
- Site Profile
- Stripe
- Email Notifications
- CSS Framework
- Advertiser Dashboard
Some Projects are more meta-projects, e.g. Wizard Modals, where you would assign the tasks to both the page (e.g. Site Profile) and Wizard Modals when creating a Wizard Modal for the Site Profile Page. This way, Modal work can be viewed in one place (Wizard Modals project), but is also viewable by the discrete chunk of the application it applies to.
Tags
Status
- idea: for items that need further thought; braindump, possible features, anything goes
- to-implement: items that have been greenlit and need to be implemented
- to-breakout: almost always goes with to-implement, items that most likely need to be broken out into more granular pieces for execution. (most likely, this line item will be turned into a subhead on Asana via the ( item: ) feature
- refactor: items that currently exist but need to/should be refactored (improved)
- bug: items that need to be fixed and are breaking functionality
- !!!: highest priority—only use this when the item should be done before everything else, no ifs, ands or buts
- note: use sparingly (most notes should be on an item itself), but in case a piece of data needs to be saved for future reference on an abstract level related to a project, use the note tag
Personal Organization
You can also (sparingly) use tags for a GTD-style approach. For example, I use the carrierwave tag on any item that relates to image uploading in the app; chances are, if I’m in the mindspace of using carrierwave, it might be more efficient to knockout other line items related to carrierwave at the same time. Viewing by tag makes that possible.
Priority
Priority is displayed by how the items are ordered, top-to-bottom, in their individual Project page. Do not use tags, version numbers, etc to denote priority, except for !!!.
Viewing a Person’s Tasks
Each Team Member should organize their tasks using the Today / Upcoming / Later system, and order them in Today (and Upcoming, etc) by individual execution priority, so that other team members can see what’s next on their execution list at any point in time. This also gives us an easy way to see what has been accomplished by each person for periods of time to report to our stakeholders.
