A guide to Asana, the workplace management tool that helps streamline communication across teams
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Melanie Weir
Apr 16, 2021, 04:21 IST
Asana can help your workplace streamline communication and organize projects.Luis Alvarez/Getty Images
Asana is a workplace management dashboard that helps streamline communication across companies and teams.
Asana is customizable, and allows users to break down projects into tasks and set clear goals for teams.
Asana also has integration with hundreds of other apps that businesses use, like Google Drive and Outlook.
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Asana is a customizable workplace content management system (CMS) which is designed to help a wide range of companies achieve their organizational needs. More plainly, it's an advanced organizational tool to help streamline projects.
Asana is made so that workplaces of any size can analyze their progress and address issues all in one place, eliminating the need for constant meetings, email updates, and memos.
What to know about Asana
Asana has a wide range of features available to help companies and the teams within them find a system to get things done as efficiently as possible. These features include:
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Project and task management
Asana's main feature is its project and task management tools. You can create lists or boards to host certain projects as a whole - these will detail all the initiatives, meetings, and programs involved in said projects.
From there, you can break these projects into tasks and subtasks to make them more manageable, and list the steps to complete them. You can also:
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Give tasks to specific people so everyone knows who is working on what
Group tasks into sections or columns to keep them organized
Assign start dates and due dates, which can also include timed deadlines
Create reusable templates to make certain tasks easier to start
Add task dependencies to specify when some tasks need to be completed before others start
View your tasks in a timeline so everyone can see the project chronologically
Create rules to automate processes like assigning tasks and triaging
Add attachments from a number of integrated software
Communication tools
Of course, one of the most important - and difficult - parts of teamwork is communication. Asana has tools to streamline this as well.
Your Inbox tracks all your messages and their associated tasks. Here you can attach tasks to messages and use project conversations to have ongoing discussions. You can also proof images and PDFs, and any comments can even be turned into tasks so the team knows what corrections need to be made.
Multiple ways to view work
Because Asana is made to adapt to your workforce. As such, it offers several ways to view your projects and tasks:
My tasks: A view that gives you a personal to-do list
List: View and group your tasks in a grid structure
Board: Displays your upcoming tasks in a bulletin board style format
Calendar: Shows a list of tasks based on deadlines
Files: Groups together all the files uploaded to project
Inbox: Groups together all your conversations
There's also a Search view for those who don't want to painstakingly organize all their tasks.
Management and reporting tools
If you're in charge of an organization, Asana's reporting tools make it easy to keep project updates organized and send update reminders when necessary.
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You can use Asana to set "Goals" to keep everyone on the same page, and "Milestones" to reward and encourage hard work.
You can also craft status updates for projects and portfolios to send messages to your team quickly, and check your Dashboard to see the status of all ongoing projects and tasks at once, and identify problem areas if necessary.
Creating Teams lets you group people together to collaborate on projects. The Team page includes an Overview tab to track projects, a Messages tab for group conversations and announcements, and a shared Calendar tab. You can add teammates as followers on tasks not assigned to them, to keep them updated and alert them if there are problems they can help with.
Administrators also have privacy controls - you can add permissions and other privacy controls to limit access to certain work, or even keep some teams that do sensitive work hidden.
Easy app integration
One of the things that makes Asana so easy to use is its app integration. There are a number of apps that work well with Asana, but the most notable are:
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Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Office365, OneDrive, and Adobe Creative Cloud for file creation and sharing
Slack, Gmail, Outlook, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Power BI for communication
Harvest, a built-in time tracker tool
How to get Asana
Asana is available in three pre-set, tiered plans: Free, Premium, and Business. You can sign up for any of these packages on Asana's website.
Asana Basic
This free version includes the following features:
Unlimited tasks, projects, messages, file storage, and entries in your activity log
List, Board, and Calendar Views
Project briefs and overviews
Mobile apps for both iOS and Android
100-plus app integrations, including time tracking
Asana Premium
Premium plans are $13.49 per month, billed each month, plus $10.99 per month per user, billed annually.
Asana Premium includes all the features the free version does, plus:
Timeline view and Dashboard reporting
Advanced search features
The ability to create custom fields
Unlimited free guests - guests are users who don't share the company's email domain.
Forms, Rules, and Milestones
Admin controls
The ability to create private teams and projects
Asana Business
Asana Business is $30.49 per month, plus $24.99 per user per month annually.
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Like Premium, it comes with all the features of the plans beneath it, plus the following:
Portfolio and Goal reporting
Workload view - allows you to see how much of your team's resources are being used, and on which projects
The ability to build and customize rules
More customizable forms
The ability to request and give approvals on any project or task
Proofing for photos - allows you to leave commentary directly on pictures.
More advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, and Power BI
Asana Enterprise
Asana Enterprise is designed for businesses with high-security needs and support on call. There is no set price for this plan - Asana recommends that you contact its sales team directly to discuss pricing that will work for your company.
You get all the features listed in the packages above, plus:
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