The Hallazgos virtual team relies on software to make us fast, efficient, and on track for projects. I’m going to kick off our company blog with some of the tools we use everyday, how we use them, and why we recommend them for our clients.
Hallazgos Must Haves #1 – Asana
Hallazgos Research Group LOVES Asana. It is our favorite way to keep track of personal and business projects. You can narrow down projects, tasks, and subtasks – and schedule and assign each layer along the way.
As Project Manager, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make Asana work even better for us. Here are some of my personal suggestions (some of which I’ve gratefully learned from clients and collaborators over the years):
Naming Conventions
In order to prevent confusion between projects or collaborators, we institute strict naming conventions on Asana tasks. At Hallazgos, a task might look like this:
[Property X] Review Lease Draft
Those brackets eliminate confusion and speed up workflow for me as Project Manager. We’ve also put this to work for our clients and the feedback has been excellent.
Project Owner Marks Tasks Complete
I find it very satisfying, and tempting, to quickly mark tasks as complete. Asana makes it fun too with little celebration animations randomly appearing. But Rochelle, Founder of Hallazgos Research Group, helped me develop some self control.
Instead of marking off tasks that have been assigned to use from a Project Owner, our team adds an “x” an “?” or an “!” to the front of the task name. This tells others if it’s done, there’s a question about it, or there’s a comment that needs to be addressed.
Letting the Project Owner review completed tasks and mark them off once they are satisfying helps us avoid going back and reopening tasks needlessly.
Asana the Great and Powerful
Books have been written on Asana — I’m not looking to compete with that market in this little corner of the internet. So, instead, consider this the first in an installment of glimpses into how Hallazgos gets stuff done.