Use case for a large data collection & research project

The Context: Hi All- I am a Research Project Manager at a large university that is on-boarding a team of faculty, staff, and students onto Asana. So far the roll-out is going well and I think we can manage our workflows well using Asana. Fingers crossed.

The Project: The question I have is about a very large research and data acquisition initiative that is on-going. We will be contacting about 70 individual counties within our state to get permission to access child welfare data from each county. This involves 4 phases: 1)Communications/Courting, 2) Data Use Agreements, security plans & negotiations, 3) Data aquisition 4) recruitment of participants (pulled from the data that was collected). There is a primary investigator involved, but there has been no project management and data collection has already begun. Basically, things were slapped together and are barely holding on now. :grimacing:

My question is: Should I build a project for each of the 70 counties within this project team (this is one of several initiatives I am managing) to keep track of the phase the project is in, if paperwork has been completed and to create task dependencies so people know when they are up to do the next step?

My hesitation is that tracking information for 70 counties (really 70 separate iterations of a similar workflow) is a lot, and I am not sure of the best way to use Asana to do this since I am a new user.

Suggestions needed:

TL;DR
What is the best use of Asana for a large data collection project that is occurring within 70 counties and involves 4 phases?

Hi @Ashley_Stauffer,
Welcome to the Community! We’re glad you reached out.

I recommend that you start by creating a template project. It sounds like a good option for you would be to have onetemplate project with four sections - one for each phase. If the same person on your team will be doing the same work across all counties, then make sure to add assignees to the template. Then, copy the template for each large data collection project - that will give you 70 projects (one per county), and name the project using a convention such as [County Name, Project Name] (ex. San Francisco County, Data Collection). In order to keep the 70 projects organized and accessible, I also recommend that you create each project in the same Asana team and/or favorite each project so it appears in your sidebar to the left.

Also, your question reminds me of discussions we’ve had here about managing separate clients in Asana. For instance, we have people who use Asana to manage client work that often follows standardized workflows. I recommend that you visit these threads on the subject to explore how these use cases can apply to yours:

Please let us know if you have follow up questions!

1 Like

Thank you! I will review this documentation, I am starting off with a “roadmap” project that outlines the larger project scope/phase and will be working things out from there.

Ashley