I have tried rather hard to get Asana going for a small team. This was about 2 years ago. I did not find it very attractive. At that time, the inability to get all the tasks across projects in a single page was frustrating. Is there anyone who has found Asana an addition over JIRA, for example? A convincing explanation would be very helpful.
Our cross-functional marketing team straddles Trello, Asana, and misc. docs in Google Drive. I've found that the creatives on the team (writers, designers, etc.) all hate Asana, but they also don't necessarily love Trello.
So I'm hunting for a system that is visually simple and can take only a few seconds to learn and use. I just came across DaPulse (no affiliation) and the screenshots and video seem interesting, but I need to play with it to see if it supports the various things we need (multiple milestones, dependencies, owners, and a good way of rolling that up to an executive dashboard that gets rid of all the minutiae). Also, that is one of the worst brand names I've seen in a while, but hey, if it works who cares.
The problem with project management tools is that if you can't get a team to use them religiously, they can do more harm than good. The second things start getting sent in email or posted in Slack and NOT captured in the tool, things break down. And if people forget to check things in the tool to stay on top of their notifications, items needing responses, etc. and update their respective pieces, then you might as well use nothing.
I have a long-term client who is a smart guy but is basically a bit averse to learning new technology - he's good with Excel from a previous time in his life, but feels now like his skills are better used elsewhere (which is not an unreasonable position to be in, sometimes). We tried him with Pivotal Tracker, and he did make the effort to use it, somewhat, but it never meshed well with how he wanted to work and he kept doing odd things like creating additional empty tasks as "dividers", which was infuriating. Then we tried him with Jira - he never got anywhere with it; too much UI, too many tabs, too many things to fill in, and the hour-long walkthrough I tried to do was just too much listening.
Finally, entirely independently of me, he started using Trello. He got it immediately, with no assistance, and loves it - he even uses it for non-work things now.
Honestly, a good chunk of the team, including creatives who are more visually inclined, hate Trello. I personally like it for some things, but it lacks the ability to do more complex project management and have it roll up into a much more simplified "executive level" view. You basically have to create a new board for that and update it separately. Blech.
- it groups teams into projects - so if you start a new project, you have to invite people to that project and each projet is very isolated (aside from some global feeds that show stuff from all projects)
- if you try to use a project as a wrapper around teams, you don't have any sub tasks under tasks or a way to create a mini project within a project -- you can create task groups, and they can kind of be a project within a project, but they're a bit too simplified.
- tasks only have two states: done and not done. this is not very accommodating for any kind of a QA process, reviewing etc. Unless you create multiple tasks for each individual task, or you use the task groups to move tasks between them. (or use person-assignment to imply state)
- it can be difficult to drill down and figure out things about a task - eg. when it was created and who created it etc. This may be some enterprise feature I'm not aware of.
on a side note, i've seen some very buggy behavior when moving tasks between task groups, but that's probably just a bug that can be fixed.
I love it for organizing my personal todo lists and daily tasks, but I've had the same experience as you with trying to use it in a team setting. We use Trello, which isn't perfect either. I guess this is Asana's attempt at closing the gap.
I have been using it with a development team for about two months, a year ago. And - compared to the alternatives - I've found it extremely unintuitive and confusing.
