by Jake Aurigema
At the Olivia Management office, the most important things are organization and communication! To make our jobs and lives easier, we use two platforms meant to help us delegate tasks and communicate throughout our workday: Slack and Asana.
As a smaller company, managing multiple artists can get hectic at times. To manage this, we work with Asana. This platform acts as the brain of the company, sending tasks and projects to our employees and interns! Every idea and request turns into a task, ensuring no assignment ever falls through the cracks. Artist managers wear many hats, so organizing our tasks and creating a hierarchy of priorities is vital to the successful execution of our projects.
The flow of Asana starts with one of the incredible OM women creating a task for either their own itinerary or their interns’ workload. They name the task at the top, which sits above the detailed description of the expectations and requirements for the task. Within the description are links, instructions, graphics, files, and more references to help the assignee do the best job possible. This system leaves full clarity for our interns, creating a smooth workflow for everyone in the office.
Each task prompts the creator to assign an employee/intern, sending it directly to their Asana profile in the “My Tasks” tab, where you can find all your duties at that time. Assigning tasks clears up any confusion on who needs to do what in the office, especially among the interns who help out with every area of what we do here at Olivia Management. Each task also has a due date, which can be a one-time date or a repeated deadline depending on your weekly/monthly tasks. This helps our staff plan their days, tackle urgent tasks first, and stay organized by checking off what is complete! Another beautiful feature of Asana are subtasks. Each main task can carry multiple subtasks, which can carry its own subtasks. This creates an incredibly coordinated structure for our team.
To notify our interns and staff on what tasks have been delegated to them on Asana, we Slack it to them! “Slack” is a noun and a verb within the vocabulary of this office. If Asana is the brain, Slack is the voice of our workday. Our entire day is narrated on this platform because it’s where all internal communication happens. Need to know what tasks need to be tackled today? Check the “#interntasks” channel! Need to know who’s in charge of writing the blog this week? Head on over to the “#blogs” channel. We create various channels to organize where to communicate certain topics, keeping everything orderly and allowing questions and requests to be answered promptly. Also, everyone has a “Threads” tab that shows you any unanswered messages you were mentioned in. Threads also keep each Slack message organized, so you can also go back to a specific conversation for reference to your task or question.
Slack also allows you to tag fellow employees to grab their attention to what you have to say! Based on your needs/questions, you can tag the person best suited to respond, or you can tag the entire channel in case you have a general request. Slack is a lifesaver, especially for those days when we have to work from home!
Every piece of work follows the same lifecycle at Olivia Management: captured, clarified, assigned, Slacked, and completed. That consistency is what keeps our team on the same page and our projects moving.