Asana can be a very useful resource for managing projects and tasks remotely. However, do you know what are the best Asana tips to use it properly and boost your organization? 

In this article, our partner Asana shows some tips provided by Shopify to optimize the use of Asana in work teams. Discover how Asana software can benefit your company. 

Asana tips: how to generate a great workplace?

Today’s knowledge workers spend about 60% of their time on “work about work”—such as unnecessary meetings, status checks, and searching for information—according to the Anatomy of Work Index 2021. Even before remote work, the average large U.S. business lost $45 million in productivity each year because of inefficient knowledge sharing. 

Fortunately, Katie Laliberte, Senior Security Analyst Plus at Shopify, provided 7 Asana tips to boost team organization through this tool, that are important in the present, but will be even more so in the future of the work. Discover them here. 

1. Understand how the team currently works and what the top pain points are

Before you start building out anything in Asana, get clear on your team’s current workflows so you can understand the pain points of different stakeholders upfront. These insights will inform how you set up the process in Asana to address the challenges your team is currently experiencing.

As part of this research, try to measure the impact the current process and pain points are having on the team’s productivity and efficiency. This will not only help them feel heard and like they’re part of the journey, but it will give you the insights you need to build out the new workflows in Asana. 

2. Align on the ideal state with teammates and stakeholders 

After you understand your team’s current workflows and challenges, Katie suggests asking two important questions: 

• What do we want to improve about this workflow? 
• How do we want to change this workflow? 

These two questions will help you understand what the improved, ideal state looks like for your teammates and cross-functional stakeholders. This will help you determine the right conventions, communication norms, and project structure up front so that people feel their pain points will be addressed with this new way of working.

For example, when Katie was rolling out Asana to her current team, she learned that the team’s key goal was to minimize manual effort and to maximize the transparency of the work they were doing. People wanted to self-serve information about their colleagues’ work, which is exactly what Asana is helping them do. 

3. Keep your workflows simple in the beginning

After helping multiple teams adopt Asana at Shopify, Katie’s top piece of advice is: “Keep your workflows and setup as simple as possible at the beginning to increase adoption and iterate as needs arise.”

While Asana is very powerful and there’s a lot of functionality you can add to projects, Katie believes keeping the structure simple at first will ensure people don’t feel overwhelmed. For example, for an inbound request workflow, she generally creates four sections to start—backlog, in progress, blocked, complete—while they figure out what their longer term needs are. 

It generally takes Katie about an hour to set up the initial project. Then she introduces the workflow to her team and gives them an overview of how to move tasks through the sections. Since it’s intuitive and approachable, people can jump in without needing a ton of training and begin experiencing the benefits of having a single source of truth for their work within one day. 

4. Engage with your teammates in Asana

To get your team to move their work into Asana, Katie recommends, “Engage with your teammates on tasks—assign tasks with due dates so it’s clear who’s responsible, ask questions or share updates via comments, and attach files so people can find what they need right in Asana.”

According to Katie, “The more you’re driving the conversation to Asana, the easier it is for people to be on the platform and understand how it can impact their work.” So if someone sends you an email or a chat message that needs to be actioned, move it into an Asana task and reply to them there. The more you do this, the more information will be pushed to you in Asana, as opposed to seeking it out. Katie shares, “This allows me to move faster, because the information is in Asana and it’s available to me when I want to engage with it. And it gives you a complete record of your work, as opposed to documents that can be anywhere.”

Another great way to engage and collaborate with your teammates and manager in Asana is through 1:1 projects, Katie shares. You can add existing tasks you’re working on or questions about the project so you have a fleshed out agenda when it’s time to meet. These projects are also a great way to action tasks asynchronously and have a historic record of past work and discussion topics in one place. 

5. Ask for feedback and share regular updates 

You’ll need to communicate with your team a lot in the beginning to get feedback on how they’re using Asana, Katie shared. This will help you understand the pain points they’re experiencing with Asana, so you can address them via workflow improvements early. This helps people feel like you’re listening to them and addressing their concerns, which is key to change management and adoption. 

Another best practice Katie relies on is sharing regular status updates in Asana, either in projects or in tasks. This helps people experience the value of increasing work visibility across stakeholders so they can stay informed about your work without having to request an update. 

6. Integrate Asana with the other tools you already use

You likely use other tools to discuss and do work, so look at Asana’s out-of-the-box integrations to keep everything connected. The Slack integration was a game changer for Katie and her team because they could easily create tasks or comments from messages so nothing got lost.  

Katie also suggests using the email integrations Asana has, so you can turn emails into tasks and keep important communication tied to your work in Asana. This gives everyone visibility, if needed. “Wherever you are doing your work, there’s probably an Asana integration that will allow you to automate the task creation,” Katie said. 

7. Iterate on your workflows as adoption increases

As people get the hang of the workflows and feel comfortable using Asana, implement small improvements—like adding a custom field or rule—to capture key information and automate steps. 

Katie suggests regularly reviewing your workflows, ideally monthly, to determine what iterations to make. You’ll quickly learn things like, “It’d be great if we had a custom field to capture this information,” or “A rule to automatically assign tasks to X when they’re moved to section Y would save us a lot of time.” They’ll likely be quick changes if you’re iterating frequently, but they will save your team a lot of time down the road. 

Let’s implement these Asana Tips in your Project Management with Epidata

At Epidata we also leverage Asana for different day-to-day tasks. For example, we use Asana as a first-instance CRM to manage our client’s needs. Similarly, our Projects Managers also use this tool to keep their teams organized. 

For this reason, we invite you to try an Asana trial for free. As we are Asana partners, we can also offer you the presentation of a technical demo at no cost, in addition to the implementation of the tool within your organization, to see how this software adapts to your daily processes. 

In short: you already know some of the best tips for the Asana app! We are Asana Partners because we believe in the ability of this tool to empower work teams. That’s why we are dedicated to optimizing Project Management in an efficient, effective, and responsible way. Contact us for more information!

*References: adapted from Asana (2022): https://blog.asana.com/2021/09/shopify-tips-asana-adoption/ 

About Epidata

Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.

Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and UiPath. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.

Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.

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Discover how Asana Software management with Zoom is a representation of Epidata’s mission.

Today, Zoom saves an estimated 667 workdays per year with Asana features like forms, comments, templates, and more. That’s more than two years of typical 40-hour workweeks.

Within the framework of our search for innovative proposals, and in a constant evolution that seeks to incorporate the best technologies, Epidata sees Asana as a new strategic partner to continue its mission of facilitating innovation for companies.

Zoom’s new needs

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone from businesses to prime ministers signed up for a Zoom account. The leading communications provider connects millions of companies, friends, and families with video, voice, chat, and content sharing tools. And for businesses, in particular, video conferencing plays a starring role when they can’t meet with customers in person and teams can’t physically work side by side.

Zoom grew from just over 2400 employees in January 2020 to more than 5700 global employees as of June 2021 and the Business Services & IT department keeps them all connected. Gregory Daniels, Senior Manager for Technology Program Management, leads a team that focuses on IT project and program management. They oversee systems changes and deployments such as Zoom’s Okta rollout and the companywide Bring Your Own Device program. These global initiatives, with budgets in the millions of dollars, affect just about everyone at the company.

Greg has also worked to develop Zoom’s project management culture, but when he joined, teams were struggling to collaborate in a mix of spreadsheets, emails, and work management platforms. The mishmash just wasn’t working:

• Engineering and development teams used Jira, but marketing and sales teams didn’t, making visibility into upcoming feature releases difficult.
• Some teams fielded work requests from all directions, which made it difficult to scope and prioritize inbound projects.
• Status updates for executives were presented in a slide deck that teams manually updated in a tedious process.

Zoom’s workforce needed a more effective way to communicate as the company scaled up.

“As Zoom grew, we wanted a standard view of everything going on so we could prioritize work and make business decisions. We needed visibility, accountability, consistency in how work gets done, and knowledge sharing across teams.”, says Ariel Chavan, Head of Security Product and Program Management.

A solution to bridge technical and business teams

Greg and his IT colleagues began to evaluate work management platforms. A top priority was to unite Zoom’s technical and business teams to eliminate those last-minute launch scrambles. They needed a platform that had a Jira integration, and that was flexible enough to accommodate different workflows from different departments.

It was also important that individuals were able to start working on the tool without setup help from IT. In fact, a couple hundred employees at Zoom were already using Asana Software on their own. This, along with its flexibility, native Jira integration, and market-leading position, helped the IT team choose Asana as Zoom’s standard platform.

Rollout: teaching people to manage projects the Zoom way

IT rolled out Asana Software to five departments initially, and as managers brought projects into the platform, their teammates followed. More and more groups came on board as they saw the value of centralizing work, with one easy-to-share link to an Asana project that contains everything. IT also achieved leadership buy-in by moving monthly business reviews into Asana.

Greg says, “Once we made Asana official, the pent-up demand for a work management tool spilled over and we saw many more people using it over time.” Zoom’s time savings from working in Asana grew 200% year over year as adoption increased.

Greg’s team used the Asana Software rollout to teach people general organizational skills and the “Zoom way” of getting things done. “Asana is our classroom to help people learn a new way to manage projects,” he says. “We use it to teach fundamental project management skills and how to work in a repeatable, scalable way to achieve results.”

How technical and non-technical teams work together in Asana Software

Departments across Zoom use Asana Software as a source of truth.

• The engineering-business connection. Engineering teams manage day-to-day tasks in Jira, synced to Asana, so they don’t need to update marketing on every little release. “It has completely unscrambled the scramble for us,” says Greg.
• Marketing. The globally distributed marketing team uses Asana to plan campaigns and events, as well as to manage inbound requests from other teams at Zoom.
• Business Services & IT. IT uses Asana for global rollouts and systems changes, such as the Bring Your Own Device program, which achieved 90%-plus enrollment. “Asana made change management easy,” Greg says. “We could track every tiny subtask needed to help Zoom employees understand the program. There was too much going on for a spreadsheet to be effective.”
• Security. The Security team uses Asana Software to keep their projects up-to-date in real-time, so everyone can see their status. This is vital for the team’s large technical implementations and enterprise-wide rollouts, which can involve up to 20 collaborators and many more stakeholders. The team uses Portfolios to organize continuous large-scale initiatives and nested Portfolios for projects within them.

“When you’re moving this fast as an organization, it’s important to be on the same page and have a centralized tool to hold people accountable.”, states Marc Seitz, Senior Security Program Manager, Threat and Vulnerability Management.

Teams rely on a standard set of Asana Software features but use them flexibly to match their processes.

Projects are the source of truth, and Project Overviews provide context about goals, scope, time, and cost, so that nobody needs to ask the project manager.

Portfolios group projects by their program, clarify team workloads and bandwidth, and let managers monitor status in one view.

Integrations such as Jira Cloud connect technical and business teams. The Zoom integration lets meeting attendees take notes in an Asana task within a Zoom meeting. The Zapier integration helps automate steps in workflows, while the Google Drive integration connects files to the projects they belong to.

Forms help teams collect inbound requests from internal sources in one channel. For example, the content creation team in Sales Ops Enablement collects all information upfront in their standard Asana Form. Greg says, “It was process enforcement from day one. They share a form link, receive a secure request, scope, and provide a deadline estimate.”.

They can quickly iterate on their process by changing fields in the Asana form. Zoom employees submit nearly 900 forms per month, and the efficiencies created save the company an estimated 335 days of work per year.

Templates provide a jumping-off point for new projects, saving time and ensuring no steps are forgotten. “If I’m using an Asana template,” says Greg, “an hour of project planning becomes just fifteen or twenty minutes. An hour-long kickoff meeting gets cut in half. The time savings are substantial.”

Zoom saves 667 workdays per year

Today, Zoom saves an estimated 667 workdays per year with Asana features like forms, comments, templates, and more. That’s more than two years of typical 40-hour workweeks.

Some teams have ditched manual executive slide deck updates, instead of using Portfolios to give leaders a 30,000-foot view of all initiatives. It’s also easy to spot when groups are working on similar projects, so they can consolidate work and rally their efforts.

The Anatomy of Work Index found that this duplication is common, and knowledge workers are spending 13% of their time on work that’s already been completed. The issue becomes more likely when an employee uses many apps to get things done. But for Zoom, a central home for projects shines a light on redundancies.

When all schedules, tasks, and communications are in one place, remote collaboration is easier.

Organization and discipline help companies scale

As Zoom’s project management capabilities continue to grow, more groups like Greg’s are emerging around the company. They continue to champion and innovate on the Zoom way to get things done, helping everyone execute quickly and at scale.

When employees work together in Asana Software, Zoom closes the distance between its teams—just as their products help close the distance between colleagues, loved ones, and even prime ministers.

(*) Source: adapted from Asana (2022).  https://asana.com/case-study/zoom#app-language 

About Epidata

Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.

Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and HelpSystems. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.

Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.

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Find out how Asana management with Discovery Studios is a representation of Epidata’s mission.

After implementing Asana, the different teams at Discovery Digital Studios have improved collaboration in the era of distributed and remote work. The whole team works more efficiently because everything is centralized, simplified and visible. (*)

Epidata is present in several countries around the world and has extensive experience in developing innovative projects with corporate clients. For these reasons, the partnership with Asana seeks to jointly drive innovation in virtual workspaces, providing companies with state-of-the-art solutions that allow them to adapt to the challenges of security, scalability and technological transformation of work in the software era. Within this framework, the management of Asana with Discovery Digital Studios is an example of how Epidata reflects its mission through the activity of its partners.

Introduction about Discovery Studios

Discovery Inc. is the media giant behind big-name entertainment networks like TLC, Animal Planet, and Food Network. At its core, it’s a TV business, but it maintains a massive digital footprint. Their Digital Studios content teams create thousands of videos every month for social media platforms and consumer apps. 

Content Operations Director Mike Singer helps teams at these networks conceive, produce, and distribute these videos—often making up to six versions, each one perfectly formatted for their website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms.

Before Singer and Discovery Digital Studios adopted Asana in 2014, they tried to track content production using spreadsheets and email threads. There was no standard content production process, and organization was far from optimal:

• Videos weren’t always created on time, formats were forgotten, and some sat unused because they weren’t shared with the right people internally.
• Quarterly reporting was difficult because nobody could see what content was made and where it went.
• Information didn’t flow between editorial teams, video production, content marketing, PR, and other stakeholders, often getting buried in email.

The lack of a defined process not only slowed the team down, it occasionally led to extra costs. They gan looking for a new tool to manage content production—fast forward to today, and Discovery Digital Studios has more than 400 stakeholders collaborating in Asana.

“Before Asana, there was no clean, consistent process and projects weren’t getting updated in spreadsheets as they moved along. Sometimes, they would fall off and vanish. We’d hire contractors to do massive six-month cleanup projects.” —Singer Singer, Content Operations Director

Selecting the right tool to keep the videos flowing

Singer needed a shared platform that could provide a high-level view of all content in development at once, while also capturing last-minute details of the production process for each video along with its status. He was also looking for automated notifications to help with the many hand-offs between teammates and teams—with spreadsheets, it was difficult to know when a task was complete and the next one was ready to start.

Asana’s customizable workflows would allow them to define complex content processes, give stakeholders a simple picture of the entire team’s output, and keep individual contributors and external teams connected and informed.

“We had half a dozen workflows that were tracked separately. It was great to conjoin them in Asana, see how they interlock, and notice dependencies that you couldn’t see in a spreadsheet.”

Adopting Asana one team at a time

Singer first introduced Asana to the Food Network content team, encouraging individuals to use the platform to organize their personal to-do lists. As people became more comfortable with it day-to-day, they began to track collaborative team projects in Asana.

Singer developed a repeatable formula to help teams adopt Asana, then brought it to Discovery Digital Studios’ other teams, helping them assess their workflows and build out corresponding projects. Today, every brand’s content team has Asana templates for their unique workflows, with iterations for each content type and channel.

“Frustration over not knowing where information was just disappeared. It was a cultural shift into stress relief. You could see that things were flowing more easily.”

How the puff pastry gets made

Content teams now manage all video production in Asana, even during COVID-19 shelter-in-place. They have been able to shoot videos from people’s homes, stay organized, and maintain the same level of production as before. Discovery Digital Studios is not alone in this; according to the Anatomy of Work: Remote Teams Survey, 55% of knowledge workers who used work management software felt even more productive while working remotely compared to before.

Each video format is represented by an Asana project. They use templates to easily kick off a project and to ensure no tasks are forgotten. Custom fields indicate project status, while attachments and comments keep discussions and related documents right in the task itself, so it’s faster to find information and get things done.

They add tasks to multiple projects so everyone can stay on the same page and see all the initiatives a task contributes to. For example, a “publish video” task can live in the production process for a specific video, but it can also live in the Instagram content calendar project. When the task is updated, commented on, or completed, those changes are reflected in each project the task is associated with, keeping the content calendar up to date.

“We’ve kept up the same level of content production with Asana during COVID-19 shelter-in-place. People shot videos in their homes, and engagement has gone up because folks have more time to watch.”

The teams also use integrations to connect Asana to the rest of their tools. With the Asana for Outlook integration, they can turn email action items into an Asana task right from their inboxes. They can also add any email to a task as a comment, reducing inbox clutter while saving important information. Asana for Slack lets them see project updates, add comments, and create new tasks without leaving the Slack platform. And thanks to the Zapier integration, the team has saved time by automating more of their processes.

Different teams across Discovery Digital Studios now collaborate better because they can see dependencies. For example, there is a recipe team that develops and tests dishes before filming starts. Before, the video production team needed to pester the recipe team for status updates to plan for shoots. Now, the recipe team just tracks status and important milestones in Asana, and the content team can see exactly where things stand without asking for it.

This visibility lets the team accurately predict how long work will take. It also helps them notice delays in a project, diagnose the sticking points, and get back on track. The whole team works more efficiently because everything is centralized, streamlined, and visible.

Reporting is easier, too. Let’s say a team is preparing to respond to an RFP from a brand that wants a video with a “summery” feel. The content team can easily search Asana for all videos tagged with “summer,” and pull past examples. Being organized helps them win more work.

Discovery Studios: same team, more videos

Being organized also helps them save money because they no longer need to hire contractors to do those big clean-up jobs. Content is cleaned up in Asana as it’s created. Discovery Digital Studios can redirect that budget and energy into creating value via their direct-to-consumer apps.

Source: adapted from Asana (2022). https://asana.com/case-study/discovery-digital-studios#app-language

About Epidata

Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.

Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and HelpSystems. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.

Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.

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Epidata, a leading innovation outsourcing company, signs a strategic partnership with Asana —the top work management platform designed to help teams organize and track their work.

Epidata and Asana

This is aligned with Epidata’s growth strategy, always focused on building new links to provide disruptive solutions that add value to its customers and differentiate it in the market. 

Asana specializes in project management, allowing the customer to maintain focus, meet deadlines and achieve each project’s objectives. As a cutting-edge tool, it enriches Epidata’s proposal of innovating within the trends of the future of work and the modern workplace.

As Epidata‘s CEO, Adrián Anacleto, claims: “We are working in several countries around the world and we have great experience in developing innovative projects with corporate clients. For these reasons, Asana sees in us a strategic partner in LATAM and the United States to jointly drive innovation in virtual workspaces”.

In line with Asana’s strategic vision, it is interesting to quote Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research Director for Social and Collaboration, who commented: “The growth of the Asana Partners ecosystem plus its new security announcements demonstrate a global willingness to help enterprises achieve their goals through collaboration” (Asana Partners Expands Enterprise IT Ecosystem, 2022). As such, Epidata and Asana’s joint mission will be to provide enterprises with front-line solutions that enable them to adapt to the challenges of security, scalability and technological transformation of work in the era of digitization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

About Epidata

Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and design services, application modernization, IoT, machine learning, automation and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.

Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat, HelpSystems and FCEyN – UBA (University of Buenos Aires).

Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.