This year the Reload Media Team rolled out Asana for project management. We needed something more to manage our bigger, more complex clients and long term projects. Some of the issues we wanted to overcome and things we needed from a tool were:
- needing something that worked for different people and their productivity style
- something that was useful for both self and team management
- something that could showcase project timelines and progress
- something really collaborative
- something that would work well with other systems and tools in place
We did a lot of research into what tool would tick the most boxes before deciding on Asana and our experience to date has been really positive. We've found our more visual team members are loving the calendar view and board view to manage their projects, the list-makers use list view and for those bigger complex projects, we are using timelines. Because of this flexibility we've seen a higher adoption rate across the business.
Apart from flexible views, some of the other positives we've experienced are:
- Portfolios have been really useful for managers to have better visibility on team workload and if tasks or projects are falling behind
- Custom fields have allowed us to make Asana work for different teams like our accounts team by ensuring tasks include required information to process a request
- Forms - this has transformed how we allocate work to some teams by having all requests come through this way, being reviewed and then scheduled and allocated to a team member for completion
I would give Asana a 4 out of 5 from our experience as I do think there is still some work to be done on improving some simple things, like giving you the ability to change column sizes or more smart date settings to allow a task to repeat for dates like "the last weekday of the month" but overall we are finding this has improved productivity and how we can manage projects internally across many teams both locally and internationally.