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Asana -- Almost there, but too much effort required
August 04, 2019

Asana -- Almost there, but too much effort required

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Asana

Asana has been deployed organization-wide in order to facilitate task tracking and to monitor project progress and ensure that deadlines are met. The collaborative aspects of Asana are also important in our use case, though they aren't emphasized as much as the more simplistic task management aspects are. Easy integration with Google G-Suite is also a bonus, since the G-Suite has been deployed organization-wide as well.
  • Easy to use UI.
  • Functional and direct task creation.
  • Visibility of key dates is prioritized on the landing page.
  • Tasks, sub-tasks, and other nesting and levels are possible for more complex project phases.
  • No integration with Microsoft To-Do or the Windows 10 inbox/included apps, including Action Center.
  • A son-PWA website that does not support offline usage, notifications, etc. for rich presence. It needs to have a tab open at all times to be usable.
  • Most of the more interesting (read: non-basic) functionality is locked behind the Premium paywall.
  • Tags and groupings aren't very clear, and child tasks can be viewed flat alongside parent tasks in most views, which is confusing
  • It has given clarity and visibility into projects and tasks that were done by self report only before.
  • Allows for accountability between peers on tasks by having assignments and logging of actions and tasks.
  • It has helped ensure deadlines are visible and progress is kept after by the points established above.
Within our organization, most have fallen back to their old way of tracking tasks, which varies between paper and pen notes on sticky notes to OneNote to Microsoft To-Do, to Outlook Tasks, to Windows 10 Sticky Notes.
These other tools have familiarity, ease of use, and integration with existing workflows and notifications/presence that Asana lacks, making them much more comfortable and appealing to use for our organization.
Asana has proven difficult for our organization to use consistently. The adoption after initial roll-out was very high, but continued usage dropped to nothing over the course of the first year. After a period of disuse, Asana was again recommended and re-deployed to the employees to use. Adoption the second time around was much lower.
What I feel to be the most significant barrier to entry is that Asana is effectively sandboxed and is Yet Another App™ that needs to be used, instead of interfacing seamlessly with the users' existing workflow, and being present wherever and whenever they work.
Even personally, I find that I more often reach to OneNote, To-Do, or even a physical sticky note to file a task and keep track rather than to have to log in to Asana, wait for the painful loading time to complete, find my task, jump to the subtask using an icon that isn't immediately intuitive, and adjust the child tasks as either done, undone, etc. On top of being a completely separate workflow, there is no feedback aside from opt-in emails that need to be created per project/task, as it does not integrate with Windows 10 in any way what-so-ever.

Asana Feature Ratings

Project Management
5.5
Task Management
6
Resource Management
Not Rated
Scheduling
6
Workflow Automation
Not Rated
Team Collaboration
5
Document Management
Not Rated
Email integration
5
Mobile Access
Not Rated
Budget and Expense Management
Not Rated
Professional Services Automation
Not Rated
Integration with accounting software
Not Rated

Using Asana

50 - Everyone from Engineers to Clerical staff have used Asana at one juncture or another.
2 - Asana is mostly self-supporting, though we do have in-house IT staff to field questions for those who require more direct feedback and assistance.
  • Tracking projects
  • Tracking project process
  • Visibility and accountability into projects
This is the second deployment of Asana, and it is even less well received this time around. It is highly unlikely that we will be deploying it again.

Using Asana

ProsCons
Technical support not required
Consistent
Quick to learn
Familiar
Do not like to use
  • Establish a new task
  • Complete a task
  • Add details to a task
  • Assign another user to a task
  • Managing sub-tasks
  • Arranging tasks, sub-tasks, and other details without tags which are Premium
It is usable, but not immediately intuitive, and I find that, more often than not, the features I'd like to explore are locked behind a paywall without any visibility into how useful they might even be.