Has anyone tried it already?
Our organization (Kiip.me) has been using Asana for a couple months now. We've tried a variety of tools for task management and project planning: Basecamp, GitHub issues, Pivotal. With each of these tools, up until Asana, we didn't find it helped our team very much.
Asana has changed all that. Our whole team, including BD/Sales, have been using Asana to coordinate various tasks. The biggest thing: Asana is _fast_. It doesn't get in your way! You can tab over and add a task in less than the time it takes to even load the tasks page on something like BaseCamp. Some additional features that make it great:
* Followers - You can add followers to a task if you want other people involved. This emails them and notifies them of the task.
* Comments - Comment streams are very nice. They provide a nice timeline of activities happening on a task.
* Keyboard shortcuts - I never touch the mouse in Asana. Ever. And this increases productivity by tons. You can fly around multiple projects, tasks, etc in seconds.
So there is some reasoning behind our use of Asana, here are some reasons we didn't like other options:
* BaseCamp - Had all the features we wanted, but it got in the way too much. No keyboard shortcuts, slow page loads, etc. Taking 30 seconds to add a task == too slow.
* GitHub issues - All the issues are on each separate repo. It is difficult to quickly navigate between them and to get other people in the company to look at them.
* Pivotal - The UI was completely non-intuitive to us and didn't jive with the way we wanted to work. We didn't want a tool that forced us to work with IT, we wanted a tool to work with US.
That being said, I wish there were some other features that Asana would implement:
* Dependent tasks - It is not possible right now to have a hierarchy of tasks towards various goals. This makes it weird to have one big task that is like "Ship the whole product v1" then have a ton of little tasks that are related but not obviously so.
* Multiple assignees - There are some tasks that just make sense to have multiple assignees.
Hope that helps.
Mitchell
The feature I miss more is the possibility to assign tasks to multiple team members. I'd also love to see a native iOS application. Asana team recently released a mobile-compatible version of the site that works great but I'd still prefer a native app.
I have also tried out Trello but it has a "toysh" feeling to it and Asana just has more features.
> I'm not going to summarize the good and bad aspects
> because the previous comment does it egregiously.
It's more akin to a web based collaborative version of Things http://culturedcode.com/things/ and it does this job very well. The keyboard shortcuts help you to quickly jot stuff down, throw it into a project or assign it to someone else. Anyone can leave a comment on an item or take ownership of someone eles's to-do that's been added to a project. Plus there's a personal section so you can keep the Milk reminders away from your team's projects.
Two things I'm excited about.
a) I've read somewhere that Asana wants to be the platform and if our workspace needed a custom time logging application we could build / buy this functionality and have it built into our workspace.
b) Because of the real time nature of comments / assignments the email notifications are sometimes a bit slow, it would be great to have an Jabber / iChat interface to receive and reply to incoming comments and to-dos.