Asana On-Boarding Guide for Clients

Thanks for choosing Reich Web Consulting for your project!

We use a project management app called Asana to run our projects. This on-boarding guide is designed to help you get acquainted with the parts of Asana you’ll need to understand for the project to move ahead efficiently.


Getting Started

If you’re just looking for a bare minimum intro to Asana please chek out the 2-minute Understanding Asana video from the How to Asana video series. The rest of this document provides specific instructions on how you’ll use Asana in collaboration with Reich Web Consulting to execute your project.


The contents of an Asana invitation email.

As a Reich Web Consulting client, your journey with Asana begins when we invite you to the project.

You’ll receive an invitation email at the address you  provided for project communication.

Click the View Project link in the email.

If you’re already an Asana user, you’ll be redirected right to our project. If you are new to Asana, you’ll be asked to create a profile. Don’t worry: client accounts are 100% free. After you create your account, you’ll be directed to the project. 


Asana Organization

Asana has several layers of organization that will be of varying importance for the course of the project.


Teams

Asana Sidebar Navigation

A Team is a group of Asana Users. For the purposes of our project, you’ve been invited to be a member of the Reich Web Consulting team.

You can access your teams and the projects they contain on the left sidebar. 

Lean More: Team Basics, Navigating Asana


Workspace

Asana Workspace Nvaigation

Every Asana Account belongs to one or more Workspace. A Workspace is a grouping under which one or more projects are managed.For the purposes of this project you’ll only be concerned with the Reich Web Consulting workspace.

Every account is also a member of a private workspace where they can create their own private projects. If you log in and don’t see the project you were invited to, make sure you’re viewing the right Workspace by clicking your profile icon and selecting the reich-consultinging.net workspace. (See below.)

Learn More: Workspace Basics


Projects

Projects allow you to organize all of the tasks related to a specific initiative, goal, or a big piece of work into a list or board.

For the purpose of your work with Reich Web Consulting, you will work within the project we’ve invited you to, You’re welcome to explore Asana and create your own projects outside of our workspace. But the work we do together will be limited to the Project we’ve already created.

If you’ve only been invited to one project, you’ll immediately be viewing that project when you log into Asana. Otherwise, you’ll select our Project from the lists in the Asana Sidebar.

Asana Sidebar Project & Team Navigation

To the right of the sidebar you’ll see the view of the project you have selected. At the top of the project you’ll see the project title. Just below the title you’ll see several project views: List, Board, Timeline , and Calendar, followed by additional Project level tools like Progress, Forms, Conversations, and Files.

Learn More: Project Basics, Project Actions


List View

List view displays your project’s tasks in a traditional table layout. Tasks can be grouped, filtered, and organized a variety of ways.

Learn More: Using Asana List Layout

Asana List View

Board View

Board view organizes your tasks into columns of sections. Users familiar with Trello will be familiar with this layout. Board view provides many of the same organizational tools as List view.

Learn More: Board Layout

Asana Board View

Timeline View

Timeline view will thrill experienced project managers familiar with tracking tasks and milestones on a Gantt Chart. An Asana timeline is more than just a read-only view: you can drag and drop tasks to change ordering, start dates, and end dates, and you can create links, called Project Dependencies, that will change a linked task’s start date and other properties based on changes to a linked task.

Learn More: Timeline

Asana Timeline View

Calendar View

Calendar View will be familiar to those of you who spend a lot of time in traditional calendar apps like Outlook or Google Calendar. We rarely find it useful and spend most of our time in List and Timeline Views.


Progress

Progress View helps you track task completion in a project over time and get status updates from Project Owners.

Progress View updates the overall status of a project, and also creates a conversation about the status update. If you have questions or follup comments about the status update, you can post them in the status update conversation. 

Learn More: Project Progress

Project Progress

Forms

Asana provides a Forms module for building data collection forms to standardize the way you collect information for different types of projects. At this time Reich Web Consulting is not using this module and you may ignore it.

Learn More: Forms


Conversations

Use conversations to have discussions, make an announcement, brainstorm, celebrate accomplishments, or talk about any other topic.

We use conversations to have discussions that fall outside the topic of a specific task.

Learn More: Understanding Conversations

Asana Conversations

Files View


Files View displays a gallery style view of all the images, documents, and files attached to tasks in the project or My Tasks list you’re viewing.

In Asana files are attached to tasks. Do not try to upload files on the files view. They Files view only shows files that have already been attached to a task.

Learn More: Files View

Asana Files View

Asana Email Notifications

By default Asana will send you an email every time “something” happens to task you’ve been assigned or a task you’re following. That includes status updates, comments, file uploads, changes to task properties and completion dates, etc.

If you find it cumbersome to work via email  or find that Asana sends you too many emails, it’s worth learning how to work directly with an Asana via Asana’s Inbox tab.  see the Asana and email video link below for a tutorial on how to work with Asana in an zero-email workflow

Note: If you’re not seeing the emails you expect to see in from Asana in your inbox, don’t forget to check your “Updates” tab or Spam folder. Some email systems may try to be “helpful” by automatically sorting them out of your inbox.

Learn More: Email Notifications, How to Asana: Asana & Email