Design a blog post workflow in Asana

Last week I spent 4 hours with a client designing the best #asana workflow possible to manage their blog review and publishing process. The set of constraints was quite unique:

- feedbacks needed to be collected from various sources before being sent to the author

- a final review should happen in the end

- the document is hosted on SharePoint, but internal rules made it impossible to connect Asana and Sharepoint

- most of the reviewers only used Asana for the review process, so they were relying on email notifications

- the team was getting confused by task assignment made "in advance" because the client used dependency to trigger notification at the right time, but there still was an initial notification about the assignment

- but some people liked to be warned in advance that something was coming up

- the publishing process involved several channels, including Facebook, website and LinkedIn, as well as some private LinkedIn groups only accessible by one person

- manual work should be reduced to a minimum (like assigning people when needed for example)

We ended up testing 3 variations of workflows, none of them was fully satisfying all the constraints. The best one we ended up with was having one task per blog post, with one approval custom field per reviewer, and a bunch of subtask to prepare the task, assign to reviewers, and close the task. The publishing is managed in another project, called content factory, which the task is multi-homed into to get access to custom fields about various channels.

Conclusion: in Asana, the same thing can be achieve in a lot of various ways; and sometimes you need to put in the time to actually test each solutions.