Many of us using Asana are actively involved with project management - in one form or another.
I thought I would share a few tips and techniques that you can implement to put your project management principles into action.
I follow the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) by the Project Management Institute (PMI). I won’t share the different approaches to project management, but I will talk about the domains or knowledge areas (older PMBOK guides), and managing a project on Asana, makes it really easy to cover all those domains.
Grab your coffee 
and hopefully(?!) enjoy!
These are the domains you need to be mindful of when managing a project:
- Stakeholders
- Team
- Development Approach
- Planning
- Project Work
- Delivery
- Measurement
- Uncertainty
Figure 1.0 Project Performance Domains (PMBOK Guide, PMI 2020)
So how can Asana help you adhere to your project management domains for a better successful outcome?
In this post, I will share two domains: Development Approach and Stakeholders.
Development Approach:
Whether you use predictive, Agile or Hybrid Asana has you covered. The simple approach is to build your project with a view in mind.
For predictive, make your project list view. You can benefit from the Gannt chart view as well as the calendar view.
For Agile, make it a board view.
For hybrid, use a combination of list view and timeline. The intention of the timeline is to give you the high-level progress and dependencies of the tasks. I find it useful when the project has sections/custom fields that differentiate work between agile and predictive. For example, project action items vs product development sprints.
Stakeholders
With stakeholder management, you need to consider the following activities:
- Identifying stakeholders
- Gathering Stakeholders’ Expectations
- Managing Stakeholders
Identifying Stakeholders: If you run exploration meetings with your team at the start of the project, or if you are given your stakeholders at the start of the project, Asana overview tab allows you to add the project stakeholders and identify their roles. This is very helpful for the life of the project, especially if the team grows/evolves with the life of the project
Figure 2.0 Project Members and their Roles on the Overview Tab
Gathering Stakeholders’ Expectations:
Understanding their expectations spans from what they expect the outcome of the project to be to their expectations from the communication of status updates and risk escalation.
Depending on the size of your stakeholders, you can either use:
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Forms: These help you ask specific questions, and your stakeholders will submit their details. These will be captured in tasks. If the project has many stakeholders, I would suggest creating a project for stakeholders where you use it as a reference and keep a record of all expectations.
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Assign tasks to the stakeholders. Use custom fields and questions in descriptions for them to populate. This will be stored directly and easy for you to work with.
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Managing Stakeholders: The most effective way to do so is through the status update feature that is embedded within the project. You can now also access ‘draft with AI’ for a more efficient process. The status update allows you to provide information on what was achieved, what’s blocked and what is next in the plan.
if your stakeholders are only interested in being informed, make sure you go to project permissions and notifications and untick all types of notifications for these stakeholders other than status updates. Keep it ticked. In the example below, Ginger is a stakeholder who only needs to be informed of the status update.
Figure 3.0 Example of Project Notifications being managed
If your project has risks identified, make sure you communicate the risk with relevant stakeholders before you issue the status update. So, for example, if someone needs to be informed first, add them as a collaborator to the ‘risk’ task for a heads-up before you issue your status update to the entire audience.
If you are interested in finding out more about what these features can do, here are the links to their section from the guide:
- Project Views: https://help.asana.com/hc/en-us/articles/23069999724955-Project-customization-and-views#h_01HQ133RKQFPQWKMFQSKM15WJ1
- Forms: https://help.asana.com/hc/en-us/articles/14111033233947-Forms
- Status updates: https://help.asana.com/hc/en-us/articles/14148168179099-Project-progress-and-status-updates
- Custom fields: https://help.asana.com/hc/en-us/articles/14110099577883-Custom-fields
I hope you have enjoyed your coffee. Any specific domain you are interested in me exploring next, please let me know.
