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Our team uses Asana, and we're quite happy with it as it has excellent tools for team collaboration and personal task management. However it falls down a bit when trying to manage workflow in Kanban style for a team (something Trello might be good at).

I'm wondering if any one has any advice on an optimal setup. We build websites and web apps.

So far we've created a new project which we use for our Kanban board, and it works, but it's not utilizing the power of tags, and it doesn't synch well with user's today/upcoming/later system.

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  • Can you tell us more about the tags and categories? What are they used for?
    – Zsolt
    Jun 27, 2012 at 17:20
  • I think that the current market lacks a good enterprise ready Kanban tool. The available ones are some kind of enhancements of ticketing systems so they aren't that good. So, I think you should develop one ;-) I'm not kidding. If you'll get rich over this, I'd like to have a free beer :-D
    – Zsolt
    Jun 27, 2012 at 17:22
  • great idea! Trello comes close, but is lacking in other ways and we don't want to jump on the next 'silver bullet' tech solution. Asana allows you to categorize tasks in a number of ways, but mainly by project and tags. Tasks can have multiple projects or tags, and one assigned person.
    – dwenaus
    Jun 27, 2012 at 18:26
  • This question might be re-opened if you can revamp your question to focus on what your process is and why you are having difficulty modeling it, rather than asking for a tool recommendation.
    – Todd A. Jacobs ♦
    Jul 14, 2012 at 13:09

2 Answers 2

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I've never used Asana before, but checked out the website and the videos and I'm not sure whether it is possible to do what you would like to do. My impression is that the project management offered by Asana is based on individuals and projects. It is a "bottom-up" approach. However, Kanban visualizes on the highest organizational level possible and handles the projects accordingly. It is a "top-down" approach. So two different approaches, which are hard to do at the same time.

I have two ideas, though:

  • Use Personal Kanban for a project. The priority headings will map to the basic columns of PK such as Backlog, Doing and Done and when something changes you drag and drop the task from one section to another
  • Have a separate company level Kanban board where you track the ongoing projects physically and use Asana for projects. When Asana updates, you'll update the board

A personal and probably off-topic comment. When something is hard to achieve with a tool like Asana, there's a good reason: the tool is used for something else then it was designed for. This raises some questions:

  • Why do you need Kanban?
  • What kind of additional value will the usage Kanban give to your organization?
  • Is there something wrong with the project management feature of Asana?
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  • our motivation is to be able to see the workflow process and control it in a team - hence kanban. asana lets you do it personally very well. we've come up with a solution which we're now trying out. basically we create a new project called 'Do' and assign tasks larger than 1 hr. to that project (tasks can have more than one project in asana). then in the Do project we simply create headings (adding : at the end) to organize the workflow stages. I'll post again with results.
    – dwenaus
    Jun 28, 2012 at 20:29
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I don't know Asana, but I have used a number of online and tablet kanban tools, both for Personal Kanban and enterprise-level work. I find that LeanKitKanban has excellent enterprise-level features, including multiple levels of boards for portfolio management and drill-down. It also has great lean flow metrics. AgileZen is a bit simpler, but is a good place to start for smaller teams. I also like it for Personal Kanban.

From experience, unfortunately, the Greenhopper Kanban plugin for JIRA is really cumbersome in the way it builds off JIRA filters and rules in a way that can really confuse people.

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