Product Review: Asana
When a friend told me their office had recently added Asana, I couldn’t fathom how a company could get away with having an onsite room dedicated to refreshing steam baths. Turns out Asana and a sauna are two different things. Would the work management platform prove to be as refreshing? Let’s dive into the review and see!
Product Philosophy
Asana’s tagline is to “work on big ideas, without the busywork.” So, kind of my entire productivity ethos. Their website cites a somewhat unbelievable statistic that 60% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent managing work. Upon reflection, it seems more credible when we consider what happens when a company doesn’t provide the necessary infrastructure to help its workforce optimize their time. How much latent productivity could you unlock if knowledge workers spent more time on their area of expertise rather than on the mechanics of managing and reporting on their personal workloads? This is where Asana seeks to add value.
Product Features
Asana offers capabilities in the areas of task management, project management, portfolio management, and goal setting, among other features.
Task Management
First and foremost, Asana users can create tasks, inclusive of descriptions, priority, timelines, sub-tasks, and any custom fields you choose, and assign them to individuals within your organization. Once you create tasks, you can view them in a variety of formats, including:
Basic to do list
Board view, specifically designed so the team can focus on the intricacies associated with short-term task coordination and handoff
Calendar to visualize holes in the schedule and adjust.
Project Management
In addition to managing tasks in Asana, you can manage entire projects, inclusive of the tasks and sub-tasks you’ve created. Within a project, you can group tasks into sections and identify project milestones and task interdependencies. The project view in Asana includes:
An overview page that summarizes project milestones, goals, and key staff
The opportunity to view project tasks in a list, board, timeline (think Gantt chart), or calendar format
Reporting dashboards that summarize project performance
Project messages (i.e., in-app team correspondence)
Forms that capture workflows pertinent to that project
Project files (this view collates files associated with project tasks in a single location.)
The reporting dashboards are useful for project managers to understand performance. Asana gives you the option to create project charts in a couple key categories, including resourcing, work health, and progress. (I wish they would rename the resourcing category, as I dislike using the term “resource” when referring to people.) Work health charts, such as overdue and upcoming tasks by project, display useful information for both executives and project managers.
The forms feature supports Asana’s capability to automate routine work processes. For example, you can create a form to establish a submission process for incoming requests, route that request for manager approval, set rules to respond to common actions, and automatically adjust due dates based on identified dependencies. No more searching through your emails for approvals; no more 30-person meetings spent figuring out the status of a mundane task.
Additional project management features include the ability to:
Create project briefs
Copy projects so you don’t have to recreate a prior model that has worked well
Star favorite projects for easy access
Export project data to a CSV file for further analysis.
Portfolio Management
If you’re managing multiple projects (aren’t we all?), Asana has a portfolio view to aggregate project data. You can visualize portfolio data as a list or timeline or in terms of progress or workload. You can also generate a portfolio status report to share with executives that summarizes project status and performance. Below is an example of a portfolio status report in Asana.
Goal Setting
I’m also excited that Asana has a feature around company goals. Rather than having to track OKRs in a separate application, you can input the company’s mission and strategic goals in Asana and then create team goals that align to these company goals. The goals view contextualizes ongoing work and enables the team to measure progress against OKRs. Love this, obvs.
Additional Features
Robust collaboration protocols promote productive asynchronous communications. Within Asana, users can:
Comment on tasks
Sign up to follow task progress
Message team members publicly or privately
Choose to receive in-app and/or email notifications when specific activities occur.
Asana also offers a comprehensive suite of administrative controls that allows companies to restrict access to certain projects based on team or individual affiliation. Alternatively, you can allow access to a project but prevent users from making any content changes. You can also invite guests outside of your organization to collaborate on a project.
In addition to application features, Asana has put a lot of thought into the user experience extending beyond the product itself. Its community building endeavors include:
Technology partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Slack, and Zoom
A partner network to help get new users up and running
A repository of online courses, webinars, and video tutorials called Asana Academy
A curated community forum to address user questions
A website jampacked with articles about project management, leadership, collaboration, goals, and project planning. Highlights include a playbook for managing distributed teams and a guide to setting OKRs. <3
Asana’s attention to detail is also evident throughout the onboarding process. For example, a tool tip prompted me to use the admin console to align my project with the fiscal year information for my company (the default is January 1.) This is a small detail that I doubt I would have noticed had the software not pointed it out.
One caveat: some of the pages in the web version of the tool, especially the timeline and portfolio views, took longer than expected to load. This also happened in a few places on the website. I’d recommend that Asana keep tabs on potential latency issues, as this could be offputting, particularly for enterprise users.
Product Pricing
Asana offers basic, premium, and business level plans. Those that wish to try before they buy can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the premium version, no credit card required. Unless you add credit card information for billing, the application reverts to the basic free version after the trial period expires.
The basic plan is free and geared towards individuals or small teams (up to 15 people) that are beginning to implement project management practices. The basic version includes unlimited tasks, projects, and file storage. It also offers 100+ integrations with almost any related product you can think of (Microsoft Office and Teams, Google Suite, Atlassian Suite, Slack, Tableau, PowerBI, Salesforce, Looker, Canva, Figma, Dropbox, Fellow, MailChimp, and Evernote, just to name a few.)
The premium plan is $10.99/user per month. Compared to the basic version, it has more automation capabilities for using Asana forms and rules. It also offers an unlimited number of dashboards, unlimited guest collaborators, the ability to create templates for common tasks, and enhanced privacy controls.
The business plan is $24.99/user per month. This version includes portfolio management and goal setting capabilities and is thus geared towards more mature organizations that manage multiple projects. Both the business and premium versions are available at 50% off for nonprofits on a budget.
If the business version doesn’t meet your organization’s needs, you can contact Asana for more information about its enterprise offering, which features additional security controls and customized support.
