Item: Asana
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Asana is being used to assign tasks throughout the entire organization. We have remote employees in Canada, the United States, India and the Philippines. Due to everyone working in different time zones, communication becomes a problem. By assigning tasks via Asana, everyone knows your schedule for the day and when a task is completed, the next task can start by the next person in line. Previously, we used Wrike and Trello but these tools did not provide a proper way of communicating among the team members. In Wrike, when a person up the project line changes a task's due date to a later time which affects the entire down line, there's no way of informing the other affected employees. For Trello, it was more like a post-it note. Good for planning but not easy to hold people accountable for tasks not being completed.

Pros and Cons

Able to create a template that can be copied. This is good for projects that has to be constantly repeated. For example, on-boarding a new employee.
Able to assign due dates and tasks dependency. So for example, if Task B is dependent on Task A being completed and Task A was moved to a different date, employee assigned to do Task B will be informed of the change of due date of Task A.
On a daily basis, everyone is able to see what needs to be done for the day and prioritize their time accordingly. And managers can easily check if tasks assigned to employees for the week is too little or too much and tweak assignments easily.

The ability to assign projects based on templates with a start date and the number of required days per task. In this case, Wrike is more capable. For example, if I know Task A needs 3 days to complete before Task B can start, I would like the ability to assign Task A to start on Monday and have Asana automatically assign Task B to start on Thursday when template is being copied. Unfortunately, this is not possible with Asana.

Return on Investment

Asana made the all employees more accountable for their assigned tasks.
Asana makes project management, especially repetitive ones much easier to manage. Cuts down amount of time required for tasks assignments.
Employees are happy to see what tasks are required for the day, without having to do guess work on what managers what them to do.

Usability

It is very user-friendly. Takes a new employee an hour to start figuring out how the system works. That's an important factor. You don't want to encounter the issue where employees need a week to understand how the system works. For example, JIRA, I tried using it for a week and I still don't understand the complicated layout. Asana has a simple interface. Once you see it, you get it type of program.

Support Rating

Personally, I have not contacted Asana customer service. But seeing how Asana has improved over the last 2 years, I feel that Asana is listening to their users and implementing changes to help make it better. So in that regard, Asana is continuously supporting their users.

Alternatives Considered

Wrike, Trello and JIRA Software

1. JIRA is more focused on technical developers. Hard for those non-technical users.

2. Wrike was good for project management assignment but lousy for communication after task assignment.

3. Trello was good for brain-storming a project but lousy for tasks assignment and communication.

After using the above 3 programs, our organization decided to switch to Asana. It was easy for technical and non-technical staff to use it. Communication among the cross functional teams became better. Ideas flowed better.

Other Software Used

Airtable, Klipfolio, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

Asana is well suited for companies with employees in different time zones. Everyone starts work at a different time but with the tasks assignment system, everyone knows when a task is required to be completed and when it can be started. I think Asana works among cross-functional teams too. For example, if the marketing department needs design work to be done before handing off to an outside agency for advertisement, people from different teams are involved. The project owner can scope out the entire project and start assigning tasks to stakeholders. And when the stakeholders get the assigned tasks, it is easy to communicate among the entire organization if they have comments or issues through the assigned task. Best of all, everyone is held accountable for the tasks assigned to them. If a due date is changed or if tasks are not completed, managers can hold the task owner accountable for the delay. I find that Asana also makes employees more accountable for their actions if they know that everyone involved in the project is aware of their actions or inaction.

Project Management is a breeze. Thanks to Asana!

Overall Satisfaction with Asana