

Running a HALO product development team - gvr
http://blog.tallhamn.com/post/63665522838/running-a-halo-product-development-team

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brandonbloom
Asana is complex. Too complex.

Twice now, I've witnessed a roomful of highly skilled, intelligent people
scratching their heads and shouting over each other trying to accomplish
simple tasks with Asana. There's an excess of terminology, an even bigger
excess of features, and a serious mental mismatch between "the Asana way" and
just organizing some information within a team.

On the other hand, [https://trello.com/](https://trello.com/) is an absolute
delight.

Hell, the article even goes on to explain how to shoehorn a Kanban board in to
Asana. Meanwhile, Trello essentially _is_ a Kanban board.

~~~
kbd
> Asana is complex. Too complex... I've witnessed a roomful of highly skilled,
> intelligent people scratching their heads and shouting over each other
> trying to accomplish simple tasks with Asana.

As a user of Asana, this is strange for me to read. What did they argue over?
Asana has projects, and you put tasks within the projects. If you want you can
use sub-headings to separate things within a project. How is that complex?

Asana has actually been the one project/task management tool that I've stuck
with. In contrast to you, I'm baffled how anybody manages to use Trello
productively. Different tools for different people I guess.

~~~
danudey
My boss created a project and assigned me tasks, and tagged them all. I could
see all the tasks, but not the tags, so I re-tagged everything. Now he has two
of every tag.

Also, I can't see the project that the various tasks are in, so all I have is
a giant group of tasks without any organization or context.

It's not that these are insurmountable issues, but I can't imagine a situation
where I would want to assign a task to someone but hide from them the tags and
project.

~~~
brandonbloom
Asana's vocabulary is concrete, but the UI is abstract. In contrast, Trello's
terminology is abstract, but the UI is concrete.

You need the abstraction somewhere in order to build a general purpose tool
for a large variety of teams and use cases. Realize that as a bunch of
hackers, we're great at linguistic abstraction. Average people are much worse
at it, but are pretty decent at abstraction of physical, spatial things.

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capkutay
I've used Asana and Atlassian's jira. Jira is far and away easier to use and
has much better control. It's always clear to me which issues I need to work
on first and which versions of the product they'll impact.

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fesja
We also use Asana and Kanban. However we have a simplified use in Asana. I've
found that you have too many projects and places where to look.

We have one project called Kanban board, with all the features for web, iPhone
and Android app (8 people use it). This board has several headers:

* To Production -> All tasks that are ready to be deployed

* To Test - Second test (5) -> All tasks that have to be tested a second time

* To Test - First test (15) -> All tasks that need to be tested

* Development - Finished (10) -> All tasks that have been comitted, but haven't been deployed to the alpha sever/app.

* Development - Working (7) -> All tasks that developers/designers are working on.

* Pending - Bugs -> All tasks that need to be fixed.

* Pending - Analysis -> All tasks that need to be analyzed (improve description, break them into subtasks)

* Pending - New (20) -> All tasks that need to be done

* Backlog -> All future tasks / features / suggestions

We use projects to indicate if the task is for web, iPhone or Android; and
tags if it's urgent.

There can not be more tasks that the number between parenthesis. If there are
12 in Finished for example, we know we have to deploy to the alpha server/app.

~~~
gvr
Thanks for sharing your structure!

My feeling is that it's maybe more important which states and principles one
has and that everyone understands them than whether they reside in one or four
projects. Personally, I think it's a bit easier to focus if I only have to
look at the stuff that is relevant at the moment, but I see where you're
coming from.

How did you chose the number of slots: 5, 15, 10, 7 and 20?

~~~
fesja
we started with some that seemed reasonable, and then we modify them after
some weeks of use.

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misterparker
I don't think I would say asana is complex as far as usability. The interface
and shortcuts are all pretty intuitive in my opinion. I do think though that
asana's lack of opinion or convention and freedom of how to structure the
tasks is what some people may feel is "complex".

It seems like anything that requires a bit of thought or self controlled
structure people seem to tag as complexity. In a cyber world where usability
and simplicity is defined by a users lack of need to think much as they are
using the app, this totally makes sense. But as a user of asana myself, I have
found once you get past that "feeling of complexity" \- which is just a matter
of deciding your own conventions, then asana is a beautifully simple
collaborative tool. Flexibility is not complexity, although it may feel like
it is because it requires more effort on our own part to establish the
workflow.

