Whether you are working alone or as part of a team, keeping track of projects and tasks can be hectic. At the individual level, maintaining a work-life balance while taking care of family matters can make each day a flurry of never-ending activity. Similarly, working with a large team on a complex project, especially remotely, is a challenge in collaboration and communication.
Project and workflow management tools such as Trello, Asana, and Basecamp help organizations keep track of projects, foster collaboration, and ease team communication. They also make it easier to share updates, organize resources and even integrate other business services.
Within these apps, a team can break complex projects into tasks and subtasks with a deadline, and then assign each one to a particular person. Each team member can also see which task is assigned to whom. Whether the person is on track to finish it on time, and if there are any outstanding issues with any job.
This type of open collaboration speeds up project completion while improving efficiency and productivity. It also eliminates the need for endless meetings and back and forth exchanges via email.
What is Asana?
Asana is one of the most popular work collaboration tools in use today. While working at Facebook, the founders needed a tool to help keep projects on track and enable collaboration among team members. They decided to build their own and Asana was born.
Asana has since gone mainstream as a productivity-enhancing tool for individuals and corporations alike.
This web-based and mobile application tool is highly flexible and can track different types of work, information or workflows. It is a powerful task management tool, which can be used to assign tasks to particular persons. Each task can have a description, deadlines and even attached documents. These jobs need not necessarily be part of a larger project.
Since the app is mobile or web-based, teams work together remotely and follow the progress of every member without being in the same office or location.
The utility of Asana has now been significantly expanded through the addition of Asana boards. Kanban boards are designed to give Asana closer functionality to Trello and other project management software.
The benefits of Asana
With Asana, a team can create a workspace containing a project. Each project will have tasks within it, which are assigned to team members. In every task, a member can add notes, tags, attachments or comments.
Valuable features in Asana include multiple workspaces, priorities and dues dates, custom views, automatic notifications, and calendars.
Asana makes it easy to follow projects or tasks by providing updates in your inbox. The inbox feature minimizes the need for email by notifying each member of status updates, comments, and due date changes. In fact, Asana has helped many companies lower or scrap the use of email. Asana is integrated with productivity tools such as WordPress, Hipchat, GitHub, Google Drive, Evernote, and Dropbox, which turn it into an even more powerful tool.
Kanban boards in Asana a game changer
Kanban boards originated in Japan, where they were used to revolutionize production efficiency. The word means a card or visual signal in Japanese. Boards have extensive functionality in task management tools like Asana. They are aimed at improving communication in a team and boosting efficiency.
Just like in Trello, Asana boards function as a visualization tool, which is useful in optimizing your workflow. By using kanban boards, Asana team members can now communicate much more easily. The visual nature of boards helps everyone to understand the status and progress of tasks much more easily.
Boards can also minimize bottlenecks in a project through the use of work in progress (WIP) limits. This is because it is easy to spot work overload in your workflow on kanban board. You can then pay more attention to overloaded areas or apply limits to improve efficiency.
Whatever the complexity of the project or size of team you are working with, Asana is a great workflow and task management tool that offers a more flexible alternative to Trello, BaseCamp, and other project management software.
Have you used Asana? Have you had a chance to try out the new Asana boards? Let me know on Twitter and thanks for reading.