In this episode, Alyssa and Brett sit down with Attack Theatre’s Executive Director, Rebecca Himberger, and Quantum Theater’s Managing Director, Stewart Urist, to chat about different ways to approach project management using technology in an arts organization. Together they discuss the pros and cons of Airtable and Asana, two popular and widely used management platforms, along with the challenges that arise when technology doesn’t quite fit all of an organization’s needs.
[Intro music]
Alyssa: Hello, AMT Lab listeners and welcome to an interview episode with the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer.
Brett: Hi, my name is Brett. I am the Executive Director and Publisher for the Arts Management and Technology Lab.
Alyssa: In this episode we are interviewing Rebecca Himberger, the Executive Director of Attack Theatre, and Stewart Urist, the Managing Director of Quantum Theater, both located here in Pittsburgh. Today we'll be getting into the nitty gritty of project management tools, particularly Airtable and Asana. We hope you enjoy this episode is brought to you by AMT Lab.
[Musical interlude]
Alyssa: Okay, so before we begin, could you please take a moment to introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell us about which tool you have chosen for project management for your particular organization?
Stewart: Sure, my name is Stewart. I've been Managing Director at Quantum Theater for about three years and before that I spent time in a number of other arts organizations, Ford's Theater Society in Washington, DC; Broadway.com in New York, and I'm also a graduate of the Masters of Arts Management program (Carnegie Mellon University). I'm really interested in tech tools, you know, different things to help my team work more efficiently. Right now, I'm using Asana and I use it kind of as a suite of productivity tools, but Asana is the main, you know, project management tool that we use. And we find it’s really useful both for kind of managing our own workflows, and also for thinking strategically on kind of long-, longer term projects, and collecting all the resources to get those things done in one place, and keeping each other accountable on meeting the deadlines to make it happen.
Rebecca: Hi, I'm Rebecca, uh, Executive Director of Attack Theater. I have been in that role since 2012 and I've been with Attack Theater since 2006. We use Airtable in a pretty robust way. We are [a] pretty dynamic and complex organization. So we have to manage a lot of pro-, ongoing programs that, that need, you know, we have, I would say, you know, five to six program managers who are simultaneously working on anywhere between five and 500 different programs that require management of guest artists and people and, and budgets. And what Airtable has afforded us the ability to do is to, to kind of track and I mean, back to what Stewart just said was accountability. And it's, what we like about Airtable is, it is kind of the, it's a more robust Excel. [light laughter] Which is I mean, we all kind of laugh, but when you're working with artists who are, and this is a really, I really don't want to offend anyone here, but slow to change and slow to adapt to new tools.
You know, we we've tried Asana, we've tried a-, Trello. We’ve tried-, there's a lot of project management tools where all of a sudden, it's shooting a knat with a cannon. And it's like, here's, here's this tool, and they don't know how to even I mean, I hate to say this log on, let alone use the, the, the tools that are kind of presented to them. Airtable was kind of essentially easing, easing them into “here's a project management system”, that they understand. Use the parts of it that you can, can understand, can work within the limitations of it and then if you don't like the parts and pieces of it, just kind of ignore them and we'll build out the parts that actually makes sense for us as administrators. So what we've done is, is essentially build robust pl-, a robust platform within Airtable that has, you know, kind of forced some of our, our artists and for some of our artist/administrators to learn in our systems, you know, how to better use project management tools within a platform that looks a lot like something that they've been working in for the last 25 years. Which, you know, it's, it, it's a, I think, kind of the gateway drug to project management tools, if you will. So… [abashed laughter]
Alyssa: So, could you tell us a little bit more about your specific organizations and what they're all about and what exactly, like, their missions are?
Stewart: Yeah, Quantum Theater is an experimental theatre company. Those experiments manifest in a lot of ways, but the, one of the most visible ones is that we produce our work environmentally. So, for 30 years, we've been finding non-theater spaces all over the city of Pittsburgh and transforming them, you know, into the homes for our environmental projects. We just did a King Lear at [an] iconic blast furnace, you know, that that's in the city. We've done shows in big cathedrals, we've done them in abandoned swimming pools, we've done them in city parks. You know, we're always kind of moving around in that interplay between the plays that we produce, and you know, how the site informs them is really interesting to us. And our work itself is really eclectic, too. You know, we do operas, we collaborate with great organizations like Attack Theater on occasion, we do a lot of plays. Sometimes brand-, often brand-new works, but sometimes things that are very critically acclaimed, so eclectic environmental experimentation is kind of our DNA.
Rebecca: Attack Theater is now celebrating its 25th anniversary (as of this podcast’s recording date). This is really exciting, we were founded almost exactly 25 years ago, in 11 days. And we are a contemporary dance company, so our primary language is dance, although we partner with all different media, whether it's theatre companies, or visual artists, musicians, to create the work that we produce in and around Pittsburgh, in the region, and all over the world. We have three kinds of threads of, of our programming. Mainstage productions where we produce the work, both in theatrical environments whether it's the New Hazlett Theater here in Pittsburgh or inside specific spaces. And we also do commissions and collaborations where we work with the Pittsburgh Opera, the symphony, Quantum Theater as an example, and then other kind of non-arts organizations, whether they are social service organizations, or environmental organizations throughout the city of Pittsburgh and beyond. And then another major component of what we do is creative learning programs where we bring kinesthetic learning into the classroom to integrate movement into the curriculum, and those, that is generally what we spend our days doing.
Brett: For our listeners who aren't familiar with some of these tools, Asana is a project management tool that looks like a list of tasks, or can be viewed as tasks on the calendar, or can be viewed on tasks on boards. So, anyone who's used Trello, it can mimic sort of the feeling of a Trello experience. While as Rebecca said, Airtable is designed more as a visual look that it is very familiar as an excel spreadsheet, but it's actually a robust database. And Airtable has actually been used in other ways, where people have used more the database function, but the interface obviously is in the excel spreadsheet. So, I-, does that make sense for how that-, how I explained it. Do you agree?
Stewart: Yeah, yeah.
Brett: I’m looking over at Urist at the moment. [laughter]
Stewart: Yeah, I think that that captures Asana pretty well, um, there is some flexibility baked into it, you know, we, we upgraded. So you can have up to 15 users for free, which was an advantage at like, at a free level, that has most of the functionality and that was good for getting used to this and trying it out and seeing if it works. But last year, we did upgrade to the paid version and in that paid version there's some more functionality and reporting, but the one thing I’d note is, like, the ability to add custom fields. And we've just kind of tapped that, but there's a lot of power, you know, that, that people have unlocked in that and also in like, kind of built in Gantt charts for project management if you're really big into serious project management with dependencies and timelines and stuff. Which, you know, I aspire to be there but that's not my life right now. But you can do it!
Brett: I will add as well, before I pass this back to Alyssa, both of the platforms have a lot of integrations. They can both integrate with Slack, I know that Asana integrates with Harvest, which is a time management tool. But if you were investigating something that you want to add to operations you already have as an, at an organization, you can definitely investigate what integrations are available on either tool.
Alyssa: Right, cool. So, I'm going to throw this question first at Rebecca, because I know that you talked about how you integrated Airtable and basically had your coworkers just jump into it. Do you feel that overall Airtable has helped your team communication and has helped you guys do your job a lot more efficiently?
Rebecca: Oh, gosh, okay. So, I'm going to talk about the, like, the ways that it has solved so many kind of, so many different problems. We use Airtable for, I think a good example is, we use it for payables and receivables. So, of course, we have our accounting system, it's not, it's not a replacement for our accounting systems, but a great example is that because we have so many project managers who are simultaneously working on generating scopes of work and, and generating contracts and you know, out in the field, obviously, they are not our bookkeeper, they are not our finance manager, they are not the ones who are actively working in our accounting system. So how does that information, when they're having a conversation with Alyssa, the teaching artist and saying, “Okay, Alyssa, you know, here's your scope of work and you need to, you're going to be show up on these days and you need to do this thing” and, and Alyssa says, great, cool. How does that information eventually get communicated to the person who has to generate the contract, who then has to eventually cut the check, right? There is like 10 steps before check cutting, right? Obviously, there's a, there's a lot of, there's kind of a chasm. And what we, what we have learned over the years is that write it on a cocktail napkin, or it gets communicated by carrier pigeon. [laughter] And there's a lot of assumptions here. But sending emails or, you know, text messages or, none of that works.
Alyssa: Oh yeah, it's easy for all that to get lost.
Rebecca: Lost in translation and communication. So, we have a really robust payables and receivables “Contracts to generate” Airtable where there's, you know, scope of work, who's getting paid. The second that, you know, our, the project manager starts to put information into this, to the Airtable and then tags the person who's next up, to whether it's the contract reviewer or it's the person who needs to actually approve the information is it did-, is it in the budget, I mean, then you get notified and you have to go in and actually approve it. It then goes into the “Contracts to generate” piece. It's streamlined our process. Nobody has missed a pay date ever. I mean, we work with hundreds of teaching artists, right? We're not talking about like five or six people. Again, if we were a much smaller organization, this probably wouldn't be, I would say, as necessary. But for us, we're talking about hundreds of people, right. And every week, there's lots and lots of people and lots of moving parts and pieces. And that's really necessary for us, because we're talking about a huge scope for lots of programs and people and pay dates and right, like, we need to make sure that we're really on top of that.
Another good example is we use it for season planning, right? Because we have thousands of engagements, right. We're literally all over the place all the time. And so, when we're talking about teac-, teaching engagements, or commissions and collaborations, or mainstage productions, we need to make sure that it's not you know, we're not just using a Google Calendar, right, because that's very complicated. And so especially when we're planning our season, we use it to make sure that we're tracking and planning properly. So, we have a completely different Airtable that essentially charts out-, because Airtable isn't just an excel spreadsheet. As Brett was mentioning it, it has a completely different view that you can look at calendar views, which has really allowed us to think differently about our planning. And, and we share it with all of our artistic collaborators. So again, we can tag people in it so if you are an art-, artistic collaborator, looking forward, we can plan and we can, we can look at our five-year kind of forecast in this way, which really helps us to kind of think differently about how we're planning for the future and whether or not-, and we use it for development also. So again, all of our foundation support, it's kind of overlaid on top of our five-year plan. So, like where, where do we have funding gaps for our, you know, for the next three to five years, what are the things that need foundation support or corporate support or government support? Like, it's really kind of changed how we're thinking about the future. Which, again, is for us really important because it, it makes us accountable to both ourselves and of course, to kind of all of our public support. So, yes, there’re like, so many reasons! We also use it for hiring.
Alyssa: Oh, interesting! How does that work?
Rebecca: Yeah! It's, so whenever, yeah, whenever anybody applies for a job it's the way that we track all of the applications that come in and all of the, you know, so we upload all of the resumes. It's, it also, I mean, it's just good so that nobody applies for a job and we don't say, you know, say “resume received, thank you for applying”. Did we actually get back to the person who applied? Really good place to kind of continue to track that information.
Alyssa: Well, so that's a really strong case for Airtable. Um, Stewart, do you mind if I throw the same question at you for Asana, like, do you feel that it has helped your team communication and helped you guys do your job more efficiently?
Stewart: Yeah, it definitely has. I think, um,listening to Rebecca and all the different ways like that she's using Airtable, there's a lot to be, what's striking me is the difference in like, the breadth of the implementation that's at play here. You know, I'm using Asana with my administrative staff, primarily right now. I have not integrated the artistic side of it, I think, as a function of how we produce our work. You know, we don't have hundreds of collaborators. We have, you know, maybe a couple, a few-, a couple dozen over the course of the year and these really intense engagements kind of centered on our environmental productions. So, we'll be, we do three shows a year, and we will find sites and we will create our shows in those places, you know, over like a pretty intense eight week periods. There's certainly all sorts of planning and logistics that goes into the lead time there,but those artistic processes, you know, that's on our Founder and Artistic Director and our Director of Production still really, to drive those processes and to determine, you know, how they want to marshal those resources. Although I’ll happily be there waiting in the wings when they come knocking for Asana. [light laughter] But as of yet, you know, that's not been fruitful for, like our mode of working. But I think it's really interesting, you know, the breadth of that implementation and the kind of like cross company integration, there's a lot to be said just for, you know, that type of like fully integrated approach.
Some of the stuff is familiar, you know. So, like Brett said, Asana, the primary ways that you look at it, right, are like a to-do list that you kind of tick off and you can have sections in that, in a project, or you can indicate like what a significant milestone is and you can mark things dependent on each other. So, it's a pretty powerful to-do list, but it has there's a linear kind of mode of thought that I think goes through all of the Asana pro-, programs. You know, they all are-, everything you make is basically meant to be a project that kind of has a beginning, middle, and end. And so that, that logic, you know, lends it to, to planning, you know, specific things. So we might have a project for our gala, you know, which is something we're thinking about right now, that's coming up in April, you know, and we'll be, there are, you know, sections that are related to, you know, the venue and all the things that hav-, have to happen there, and whose responsibility that is and when it's due, and things relating to sponsorship, and things relating to, you know, you know, marketing and promotion, print materials.
You know, all of that stuff can be tracked, again, back to accountability, which I think we just both feel really, it's important to keep all those balls, you know, moving. You know, it lets you kind of see that all in one place. And it lets us know who is responsible and to track it there, but it's really the side sheets and you know, like. So like, I wouldn't have like my budget, like pulled into Asana, you know, it would live on the Google Drive, I would know where it is. I use it more to track, you know, how things are progressing along, and the individual data pieces might live elsewhere. I think like an exception is payables. I did, you know, really, it's so easy to drop the ball on a check if there's multiple people that have authorization to get someone paid and as we've grown, you know, that is the case. So, there is a place where like those contractor payments now go, and that's my idiot check to make sure that that goes in that you know, AP folder, you know, so that check gets cut. I don't have hundreds of teaching artists, but I still have plenty of different artists that we're working with and they all like to get paid.
[laughter, jumbled voices speaking at once]
Brett: Every time I mean, [inaudible]
Stewart: Yeah, yeah, right!
Alyssa: I mean it’s the considerate thing to do.
Stewart: Um, but I think, you know, I think my, the implementation of Asana is a bit more, more constrained? I think we don't use it in as many areas, we use it to drive kind of our main projects, and we use it, I use it a lot on managing my team as well. I guess like having agendas for, I have like team meetings with, you know, all of like my administrative staff, I have one to one meetings, and it allows us if we have something we want to talk about, we don't have to pull each other out of our workflow, which you know, can be really disruptive. We can park it in one of those places like, “Hey, we want to dig into this” and it's, you know, there on the agenda and visible and we kind of can accrue things for each other there. So, a communication tool is like another way that it manifests for us because it's-, those tasks lend themselves to, to commenting back and forth and you know, some amount of communication in that space, but maybe less to like the kind of database adjacent functions of like, what is the status that this grant is moving through? Or you know, you know, some of those like, totally integrated approaches that Rebecca was talking about.
Brett: So, I want to kick in a quick question-
Rebecca: Yeah, because I had a question about [inaudible] Okay.
Brett: Since both of you are using it, and fill in if this is not part of your question, both of you are using your tools for HR functions to some degree: meetings, one on ones, hiring, etc. So, I've heard a lot of discussion of working with people, training artists to use this particular tool like Airtable. My question is, how easy was the adoption, or what was the process of transition into your institution? And what sort of training- Do you think it's an easy system to train up on? Are there hurdles to training a new-, newbie into the system? Um, sorta to talk about that, but if, and then we can…
Rebecca: That is not my question.
Brett: Okay, do you want to lead – if you’re responding to him then jump in!
Rebecca: No, no, no.
Brett: Okay.
Rebecca: I, I can just, because I think for ours, it's we, we give a lot of space for failure at Attack Theatre, it’s just kind of like a rule, like a general space of just like “it's okay to fail and you can screw this up and that's completely fine”. So, Airtable’s another really good example is that because we adopted it kind of all together, which is just like here's this thing, and we really want to try it because we think this is going to help our, overall our workflow. And we, especially coming from working with the artistic directors on this, like we really involved them in this process, which is like, “Hey Peter”, who's one of our founders, “we think that, you know, that like that crazy book that you have or you scribble with pencil and you carry it around in your backpack, wouldn’t that'd be neat if that, this was also in Airtable? Like, wouldn't it be great if you like kind of dumped all this stuff in? And so, he worked with Daniel, our marketing person, and Daniel kind of built this like really slick version of it. So, Peter has been working and there's like a Peter Airtable and like Peter just goes in and dumps it all in and uploads images. He’ll like do, you know an image search on it and, and it's really cool because you go into Peter’s Airtable and there's like all these crazy videos and GIFs and like, which is amazing, because then you can kind of see Peters brain in Airtable, which for an artist to actually see the crazy stuff he's working on, that have no linear narrative, have no, it's wild. It really is. And it's really cool because none of it is fully fleshed, it's, none of it is a story, none of it is, is a, is a show that we should write a grant for, right? So, there's that. So, kind of like, how, how is the training been when we have a new person that we've hired, that's come on, and we're like, this is how we use it. Here's one version, here's Peter’s kind of crazy Airtable version, and then here's also accounts payable. Which is very much like, get the information in, people got to get paid, like make sure the information is here by the time that checks get cut. So, it's very much like you can use it how you feel comfortable and ask questions because we're going to fail sometimes. And so, the, the training has been very, I think fluid in our organization.
Stewart: I think, um, the training’s been pretty, Asana has nice tools built like an orientation project that gets you through the basics and like, lets you practice clicking things off and creating things and doing sections, so it helps orient you, helps orient new users a bit too. But I think also like our kind of, like, constrained deployment has made that training pretty smooth. Because, you know, part of like my onboarding with people, right, they, they do all their paperwork, we go through the manual, you know, we make sure they get their direct deposit, we do all these things to show them where the bathrooms are, where the light switches are, you know, and then, like we talk about, you know, how we communicate. And Asana is like one of those key tools and it's, you know, this is a place that you will get deadlines and you know, that you will, they will be communicating back and forth, or when we have meeting agendas, you know, you'll look for the full staff meeting agenda here, you'll see our one to one meeting agenda here. So some of the stuff is like really, uh, centralizing other things that would exist in most companies and just like putting them into a place that is shared and visible, you know, instead of on my legal pad. That checklist, you know, lives in a place that like I can see as the manager. You know, so some of, some of its really intuitive and then some of the others, other ways are self serve. Like, you know, you have, you're “my person-“, “my tasks”, you don't even have to make that “my tasks” place visible. So, by all means use that however you want, don't put it in a pro-, don't put it in a project. And then other stuff we've kind of learned together, like some of this project planning, that's been really, you know, it's, it is not so regimented for us yet, there's like a way that this must be done with milestones and structures. I kind of orient them on, like a project to something that has a beginning, middle, and end, you know, with like the exception of these like kind of recurring things like agendas and stuff. So, we talk about what how, how we think of different data hierarchies, but people can create projects to manage things in the ways that are needed and so long as you know, that is visible, and I understand it, that works. We would just kind of bring them into like those more structured systems and the ones that are already in progress, but mostly, you know, because like it's project by project, we're kind of iterating how we use it as we go along. And I think you know, getting better over time, hopefully.
Rebecca: My question for you about Asana-
Stewart: Yeah.
Rebecca: Because, because we've kind of put our feet in the Asana pool earlier on. And I think what was maybe unfulfilling for us, or, or, or it was a big question and then we couldn't quite get past that hurdle was that it is very much beginning, middle and end. And because so many things just don't have ends, right, they are either iterative or ongoing, or, you know, for us, it's like, it's long term planning, and you know, all of that. How do you, how do you use that to kind of, to, to, to actually execute programming and how to like, if things truly aren't beginning, middle, end, right? Maybe it's just middle, right?
Stewart: Right.
Rebecca: Or it is about planning or it is about, you know, like, how do you use that as a tool to be able to, especially when it's in working with your administrative staff, where things are-, aren't often programs?
Stewart: Right, right.
Rebecca: And that was one of our bigger challenges where it's not like, it's not always just like check the box because we done a task. Does that make sense?
Stewart: Well, yeah, some of the stuff or some of the things are loose tasks that live in like, kind of functional area projects. I actually have just like, like a kind of general project with subsections for like, this is a marketing thing, this is a development thing, you know. So, when it's not so granular that I need someone to tick off every time they do an acknowledgement, right, like that's just counterproductive. But there are like recurring tasks that I do like to keep an eye on and I just kind of like things that are ongoing, like, you know, like, payroll happens every week or you know, like that, that kind of stuff can be set to recur, can kind of live in this limbo space and then you know, I can see it in like their individual-, I click on their picture and see their workflow and it'll still live there and I know that they're aware of it and I'll know that they tick it off. But you know, the, the stuff that kind of goes on in perpetuity, I guess like we still try and cook it down into manageable, into like project chunks a lot of the time I guess, because it is like so… Really, we are project, project, project, project a lot of the time, you know, everything. I'm trying to think of stuff that like wouldn't fit into… So it’s like the big strategic planning questions, I guess, or like the annual budget type stuff, that is a collaboration between, you know, me who uses the system and, you know, my executive artistic director, you know, who doesn't use this system. So that's still more analog process, I don't feel pressure, I guess to put it on there, because we have other ways of managing that stuff still. And those documents, you know, live outside of the shared space, although, you know, certainly the directives as a strategic plan inform, you know, what projects I'm creating and doling out to other people. It isn't, you know, that's what struck me again about what you're talking about, it's like it really all ties up and it all sounds kind of like, visible, like in that hierarchy, you know, from strategic plan all the way down. I think there is a level where like that higher, that highest level of like organizational imperative lives outside this space for us and things flow down into Asana at the time that they become actionable, and we know like,
Rebecca: And tactical.
Stewart: Exactly, yeah. But I think it's not-, I like there was a time that I was kind of throwing this, like higher level stuff in there. And then it would just like,
Rebecca: Sit forever.
Stewart: Yeah. And then like, and I'm like, what am I doing? I'm confused by this. And I really just, I realized this is a place where things go, when you want to get them done, and you want to shepherd them in a process to getting done. It's not so much a space, although I've been messing with boards, and like, you know, there is some potential there, you know, with that board space, because it just it feels more nonlinear and you can kind of drag things like, you know, left to right along like a time-, like you could create steps, right, and you can drag things through there. So, there's a way, there's ways that you could use it, I think and the blog, there's a good Asana blog that like I don't spend as much time on as I should and I just got an email for them where they're like, “You’re a nonprofit, would you like some, like free like consulting on how to use Asana better?” You know, so yeah, yeah, yeah, I would, you know, so I think like, I think we're learning how to-. I would love to have it, you know, that fully, full company, full, like top to bottom, but I'm also a realist on, you know, what works for different people's modes of working, there's some people who are just not comfortable. Some artists are not comfortable with technology, and I've not wanted to push them, Excel is scary for some of my folks.
Rebecca: Right! Well, and I think the thing that we find, and, and when we have what I'll say, you know, “executive level conversations” and so here we are, where you know, yes, the C, C-suite, you know, conversations, whatever, whatever that means. But I do think it's important that you could make every system, every tool, every project that you could say you know, we have it all and it is only as good as the people who use it. And I don't mean like that your, your team, but it's only as good as the like, you could we have everything right, we've got Excel, we've got numbers, we've got Google Sheets, we've got like we have every computer, we have, we've got typewriters, we've got paper, we've got pens, we but, but if your team doesn't use them, they're not good, they are not good, right? And so, and this is where what we heard in every conversation was, you know, so we, we had a really robust Google Docs, Google everything. But what we were finding is that nobody was updating anything, right? They weren't being updated. So great. Okay, so that one's done. So, then we tried Asana – nobody used it, right? Again, it's like, doesn't matter if it's never being updated, it's never being used. And so then we sat with the team and said, and again, it doesn't matter what I like, as the, as the executive director, doesn't matter what I like, if they'll come back to me and say, we like pens and papers and whiteboards. But if they use it every day, if that is the system, and all they want to do is write it on sticky notes and hang it all over the office. But if that's the system, that's a great project management system, because if they use it, and it works, great, you know what I mean? And so, we, you have to listen. And so again, back to your point it’s like, it doesn't have to go through the whole organization if your system is working, right? If it's on one side of the organization and the other side still funnels the information properly, and you use it in the right ways, like we happen to make it work through the whole organization or the parts that need it. So…
Stewart: Yeah, and that's totally how I've thought about it, is like solving things piecemeal, rather than trying to solve them all at once, you know. Like Quantum’s administrative staff grew from-, it grew and restructured significantly, in the past few years, and then specialized really. You know, we went from having like, a few generalist positions really, to now we have like a marketing person and a development person, and we have so much focus on community engagement. And you know, I'm working really closely with all of them. So as we have that specialization, there is more of that need for you know, kind of specific, directed workflows. And this is really flow, like, flow out of that process, I guess, and growth with the company, whereas on the artistic side, you know, we've been making shows for 30 years and they always go up and you know, usually people like them! [laughter] So, like to some degree, there's like a, you know, if it's not broken, don't try and like throw a technology tool at it. But I do keep an eye out for the pieces that are broken. And when I hear from like a set designer, wow, you know, these hundred email chains, these Gmail chains that are so long, that they're splitting into another Gmail changes, we've gone over the limit, this is really disruptive. So you know, they're playing with Google tools right now and they have some kind of, the recent projects have had some kind of shared documents and that's been like a good iterative step. You know, we were using Dropbox for a while for files and I don't have nice things, no feelings for that. But you know, we get as a nonprofit company, like a really, you get the G Suite.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Stewart: And, you know, basically unlimited space. So now they have like a team Drive where they can do stuff and it feels more like a file structure that works for them and it plays nicely with all the Google apps that everybody has. So, you know, I am working with them on different sort of tools that serve their projects but I have not pulled them yet into Asana, you know, to, to, to actually manage that project process. Although something like a dream board, like you're talking about that Peter uses, or I know, there's other tools that have that kind of like, you know, whiteboard kind of dream space feel, that might match more with the aesthetic and actually be used for them. So, I’m keeping my eyes open for it and I'm going to like, keep my eyes open at Airtable for them, but you know, it's a, for, for what I'm doing, you know that, definitely it needs following the form.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Brett: So, you’ve both obviously used other project management tools and experienced technology at various levels. Do you, did you have something that made you sort of click to-, is there a financial or business reason aside from functionality and clarity that helped push you into this? Like was, what was that critical factor, and if you were talking to somebody who's sitting out there with an organization that they're like, Oh, I think, I, project management, we really need one of these, is there a decision tree that would help them do this? Like, what are those factors?
Stewart: How much do you want to spend, is always a big one, right? You know, like, it's, or like part of part of that matrix. I know, at least like the culture in the organization, we, we had our computers and like the basic office software on there, but we didn't like pay for cloud services really, at all. So, Asana was good, because I could try it for free and I think that's the case with a lot of different ones. But you know, there's, there's, it's not just like a 30 day trial for free, I guess, like there's a level that this thing functions for free for up to 15 users and like, so that led us to assess really, on like an ongoing way, if it could work. And you know, and then crunching that cost, you know, I can have like a year's membership for all my people for like $250 bucks, which is, you know, reasonable for the amount of work that it gets done. So that's certainly, um, part of what we were crunching.
Rebecca: We still use the free version of Airtable because Airtable’s, the upgraded version just unlocks like colors or something. It's really not worth- Sorry, sorry, Airtable, you're great. You should pay for it. But sorry. [laughter] No, honestly, honest to God, I'm just kind of like, because we, we've recommended Airtable to so many people that we have enough credits to actually get the premium version. Like we have, we do, we have, we have enough credits and it's like, oh, you can unlock it now, go ahead. And we like looked at it and were like we don't need it. And it doesn't it doesn't like stop you from having-, we have so many bases, we have, we have like 900 bases in our Airtable like it's, yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't stop you from… Yeah, it's, it's kind of mind boggling. So, I'd say use Airtable like, go for it. There's no like, there's no barrier to using it and there's no reason to not, to like not play around it. There's no, there's nothing that stops you.
Brett: So there's, there's no user cap?
Rebecca: There's no user cap. There's no-, yeah, because they're, because everyone's an individual user and you invite people into your base. So, you have a base, Stewart has a base, Brett has a base, Alyssa has a base and then you're inviting. That's the whole – it's not like organizational base. So, everybody has their own bases and then you're essentially creating team bases based on – oh sorry – based on who you're inviting into bases. Yeah.
Stewart: Interesting. Yeah, that's definitely a distinction on how those two operate.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Brett: And I will say, as an Asana user there, there's a similarity, you can invite members to a project. So project is like a base in some ways for Airtable, and you can invite unlimited project members, it's the overall owners, you can have that. So it has an interesting difference in that sense, but I'm also trying to remember because I have looked at Airtable and we will definitely share this out in the post that associates with this podcast, a comparison on pricing, because I think the institutional models for Airtable, they also have a nonprofit pricing and they also have a concept that is more like what Asana’s structured as, a sort of an institution into projects.
Rebecca: Right.
Brett: But at that the network of vases is really unique and I guess … horizontal way? So, it's a very less hierarchical way of creating knowledge, which is an interesting structure, system structure.
Stewart: Yeah, you really don't need to pay for either of them, I guess to get your toe in it. But that's like, it's amazing how much you're able to achieve, like without-
Brett: Yes.
Stewart: Kinda like [inaudible] free [inaudible]. That's great.
Brett: Thank you institutions out there who offer free off-, options and support nonprofits.
Rebecca: No kidding.
Stewart: I think just, and you talked about trying a bunch of different things, but the other thing is like, understanding the, what you want it to look like, like, does it do you love Excel? Does Excel scare you because you're gonna be looking at a spreadsheet looking thing, you know?
Rebecca: Right.
Stewart: Do you like, click it like uh-, like Asana has a linear feel, although they did add the boards and stuff. You know, Trello never worked for me because like, my brain doesn't work in that kind of like board sense. I was in a different organization to use that and it did not click, so I can imagine managing like a team and that you know, other things that like bring in, you know, like Slack, which we use, you know, for communication and just to reduce email clutter. They're trying to bring in some task management pieces to it, but that feels like such a noisy space that I can't imagine running a project out of Slack. Like you know, it, it's very good for chatter back and forth of receiving emails, but you know, the integration is what I rely on to like kick that to like a measurable thing. So how, how you want it to look and like what you're trying to solve, I guess, you know, there's a lot of, a lot more customizability with Airtable it sounds like and from the some of the other articles I've read to serve those different purposes.
Rebecca: Right.
Alyssa: Thank you guys so much for joining us today for talking to us about all the project management tools within Airtable and Asana.
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Thanks for listening to the Arts Management and Technology Lab podcast series. You can read more on the intersection between the Arts and Technology at www.amt-lab.org, or you can listen to more interviews and discussions in our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.
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