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Managing project requests efficiently is paramount in ensuring every project starts on solid footing. Take the case of Kevin, a PMO lead at a pharmaceutical company. Kevin uses Asana to establish a streamlined approach to project intake, gathering and triaging requests from various teams across his organization into his own project.

Capture work requests and essential details from the outset

To collect project requests, Kevin uses an Asana Form which collects information from the requester and captures it in the form of a task. The form gathers all the necessary details from the outset, allowing Kevin to prioritize and assign the resulting tasks knowing that he has all the information needed. Kevin and the project’s stakeholders thereby avoid the fragmented communication of email threads and messages, since information is centralized and accessible to everyone.

Since each request captured through Kevin’s form enters the Project Intake project as a task, he can make use of custom fields to add further detail to the tasks themselves, and even report on them later. Custom fields like Priority and Estimated Effort are crucial for Kevin to sequence and prioritize projects efficiently. This structured approach makes prioritization easy and ensures that high-impact projects move forward swiftly.

Enhance cross-functional visibility with multi-homing

By multi-homing the task into other relevant projects, visibility is maintained across different phases and across different teams. Multi-homing places the same task into multiple projects simultaneously, meaning changes made to the task from anywhere automatically sync across the other projects it lives in.

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Cross-functional teams can set up their projects and processes in their preferred manner, but can still rely on a single task multi-homed in their respective projects to act as the source of truth.

Automate your workflow with rules and integrations

Next, Kevin uses rules to automate the workflow further, automatically assigning tasks for initial review and notifying teams when their project request has been approved - without any manual intervention. Some of the stakeholders use Microsoft Teams to communicate, so Kevin sets a rule to send a message to a specific Teams channel via the Asana Teams integration when the task reaches a certain stage. This is not limited to MS Teams, and Asana’s Slack integration can be combined with rules to the same end.

Leverage capacity planning for effective workload management

To manage the PMO team’s workload effectively, Kevin leverages the capacity planning feature. Capacity planning provides a comprehensive view of team bandwidth at the project level, allowing for strategic assignment of projects based on availability and expertise.

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Ensure consistent execution with custom project templates

When a project is green-lit, Kevin uses custom project templates tailored for regulatory compliance projects. These templates equip project managers with a predefined set of tasks, fields, and automations to facilitate a quick start and consistent execution across projects.

The project intake process described here shows how Asana’s diverse features can be integrated to empower Kevin and his team to maintain a high standard of productivity and collaboration.

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