I’ve been an Asana Ambassador at our local site (about 300 total employees) for a couple of years. We’re a premium site with about 40 active users and use Asana for PM, onboarding, training, vendor relationship, etc. . Managing the adoption of these 40 users has been fun, exciting, and manageable. I spend about 40-60 with each new user giving them the basic orientation and access to the recommended academy courses including fundamentals.
Word is spreading within the organization about what a great collaboration, and work management tool Asana is. New user at our Head Office, consultants, and Executives all have their interests piqued… This is GREAT!
However, I’m a little concerned about my bandwidth and ability to start onboarding what are soon to be many more members of the Asana community in our work place, while managing my regular demand… I was looking for some tips, ideas, and techniques to help spread the Asana word, increase adoption, and provide support all in a timely manner so as not to stymie user acceptance and participation. 40 users I can deal with. 50-100 might start to become overwhelming.
How did some of you handle the surge? Did you recruit a group of Asana Champions to help? Did you bring in some resources from Asana’s Customer Success team.
Any suggestions are welcome…
Thank you community!
@Julien_RENAUD any recommendation you would share based on your experience?
@Mark_Nattress - we start folks off with a mentor and a customized version of the Asana Onboarding Project Template. That gets them familiar with the basics. After that, we can spend 1 on 1 time or small group time together, and immediately dive into specifics or Q&A, cutting down the overall personal time investment. Here’s a few things we’ve done:
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We’ve added in our own descriptions that take the videos and descriptions Asana already has in the project and give it context for how we use a particular feature in our company/department
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Mentors are there for a general introduction to Asana and then the onboarding template, and check in to see how things are going
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We’ve put together a task with a list of good blog posts and other Asana generated content for them to peruse before a more advanced conversation
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We’ve put together a task with internally generated, recorded training conversations that are more specific to departmental or company use
Hi @Mark_Nattress,
@Marie Thank you for the mention 
After I started Asana in my company a year and a half ago, we have 200 licenses today. Asana’s deployment takes time and it’s a rich experience managing that from the beginning.
So like you, I first trained the people to whom I introduced Asana, and through word of mouth, I quickly had 20, then 30 … and then too many people to train. So, I did advanced training to a few people who could carry the idea of a deployment of Asana within the company.
When we reached more than 100 accounts, and all geographic locations heard about Asana, points were organized with my management, and we validated the tool and its official deployment this time in the company. And important point Asana continued to be managed by the collaborators and therefore mainly by me.
So here are some tips from my experience:
- You need to make sense and explain your vision of Asana in your company and explain what the tool could bring, it’s very important if you want people to adhere to your idea.
- Asana is very flexible and there are plenty of ways to meet a need. So you need to be able to offer several answers for a given problem, and then the colleague or the team will choose what suits them best. And to open up to other practices, the Community Forum is the best place!
- I trained an expert in each service and on each geographic site so that all users have local support, and who knows their daily life better. I then regularly lead this team of experts, which allows us to discuss news, share difficulties and good practices. Lots to say Then they transmit information to their team.
- We have created a team opened to everyone with training (sat up as projects) for beginners, experts, … and each new hire is trained by his local expert.
- As a result of point 4, we must unfortunately not hope that people take the time alone to train, we must go to them in general.
- There will be difficult times in the deployment, but believe it, the change is never obvious but it is worth it.
- Another tips: @Sebastian_Paasch has written a great post on implementation
Asana Implementation Process: Best practices and lessons learned from different companies
These are some ideas but I could talk about that during hours
Great tactics Laura! I will definitely use them.
Can I ask the amount in your user base, and how many mentors you have? Mentorship grows with adoption I realize, but was wondering if you had say a 2:10 ratio of mentors to new users to start or something like that.
Wow! Thank you very much Julien! There are some items here that I really didn’t consider in my current deployment practices, but that could really help (ex. getting users involved in the community). I will also look at @Sebastian_Paasch article.
The Asana Community comes through again!
Thanks!
In fact I’m the only one involved in the Community and then I explain to others what I learned.
Involving them could be a good idea but I’m not sure they would spend time on it…
Another tip: if you’re a admin of your organization then you can download a csv file with very useful informations as “last login date” for instance. Every week, I analyse the csv (I created an Excel to analyse it) and I have statistics on the use of each licence, and I can filter by site, by departments, … it’s very useful to detect where you have to make effort to deploy Asana.
We’ve a little shy of 200 users right now, but about to add another office of 30 to that mix! For my department, we use a 1:1 ratio - more than that, and our mentors were not able to spend as much time as they wanted with users.
So, you’ll have 30 mentors for next roll out? I’m envious… How did you identify mentors capability? Did you ask for volunteers?
From my experience, mentors must be: voluntary, motivated, proactive, organized to help each other, able to explain the vision and not just the tool technically. This mean you have to organize the team, train, share, discuss,… and this takes time.
In my opinion motivation is the key, because any mentor will necessarily have colleagues among their team who will be refractory to Asana, and he will have to know how to react and continue to believe what he does.
Today I have built a team of 17 people to follow up in each department, and it’s really important to keep them motivated.
Lastly, he must accept to spend some time for Asana and that their role of mentor does not always go last in their priority. But unfortunately it is necessary that the hierarchy accepts that also, or it is a little bit lost … But again, the most motivated will succeed in finding time for Asana.
Believe in your vision and your mentors team will cope with every difficulties 
@Mark_Nattress thank you so much for the post. I am in exactly the same evolution point as you. We have 40 right now and I get asked monthly if new folks can come in. It’s an exiting time when you see your baby growing (it was Asana of one - me! - in 2013 when I started). I have done various versions of mentors and a more expansive Asana onboarding project as @Julien_RENAUD and @Laura_Johnson mentioned. I’m building phase 2 of getting a stronger set of mentors in place, formalizing that group, and morphing our Asana learning project to be a hybrid between our LMS and hands on Asana practice. Just to help give me some structure on adoption and how many folks are finishing their onboarding projects.
I am assembling a team of mentors as we speak. I have a question- were your mentors remote? Most of my team is spread out, so I’m challenged with making them available to users. Perhaps an email to the team or use a forum based approach so that users can reach out to mentors. Having one mentor per site right now is not feasible as I don’t have that many adopters yet.
We use Asana on several sites, in several countries, so I have a mentor on each site. The deployment of Asana was by word of mouth so the difficulty was to quickly find a mentor every time a site started using it. But it is necessary, because I am convinced that without mentor deployment is impossible, or it must be imposed hierarchically but it is not too team spirit or collaborative.
So you have to find the right candidate among people who just discover Asana, not always simple … Then you have to find the right way to pilot this team of mentor. And it may be useful to analyze the csv file with login stats to detect sites where the deployment is going well or not.
But in any case, a mentor is the key because it is necessary to provide an answer as quickly as possible to users, or the deployment will be a failure or very long …
Laura!
Would you be willing to share your “good blog post” task list? I’m looking to build a “Mentorship Project”, and well, I’d rather not hunt and peck for some of those useful Asana items. I can’t promise 
s, but a heartfelt “thank you” would definitely be in order.
Thanks Julien- my Mentor team is growing, and now I just need to start creating some collaboration tools we can all use. Maybe I can make up some Asana swag with the official marketing materials provided by #AsanaTogether. Thanks again!
Congrats! Leading such 1 deployment is a great experience👏
What do you mean by “collaboration tools”?
By collaboration tools I meant some activities, tools, or tasks that help the Mentors work together and assist new users.
Sure can!! Here you go:
Management/Team Leaders:
3 Ways to monitor project statuses with Portfolios: Ways to monitor project statuses & get updates with Asana Portfolios
5 Powerful tactics we use to achieve great teamwork: 5 powerful tactics we use to achieve great teamwork - The Asana Blog
The best advice I have for leaders and teams: The best advice I have for leaders & teams by Justin Rosenstein
Individual Productivity:
Best Practices: Individual Task Management: Best Practices: Individual Task Management - The Asana Blog
Best Practices: Using Asana for Project Management: Best Practices for Using Asana as Your Project Management Tool
Video: Plan your day in Asana: Video: Plan your day in Asana - The Asana Blog
Stop Wasting Time: 4 steps to take back your day: Stop wasting time: 4 steps to take back your day
Asana Tips: Doing More With Tasks: Asana tips: doing more with tasks - The Asana Blog
Asana Tips: Two New Things you can do with Tasks: New features in Asana tasks: edit comments, paste images, & more
3 Reasons to Plan your Projects in Timeline: How you can create a project plan with Asana Timeline
3 Tips for adapting project plans with Timeline: How to manage and change project plans with Asana Timeline
Update Asana tasks from Outlook with Actionable Messages: New Features in the Asana Outlook Integration
Out of Office: 4 Ways to prep for your vacation with Asana: 4 Things to add to your out of office prep checklist
Best Practices:
The Power of Tasks in Multiple Projects: The Power of Tasks in Multiple Projects - The Asana Blog
Using Hypertext: Introducing Hypertext: “@” Links for Projects, Tasks, People, And Tags
The 5 secrets to leading great meetings: The 5 secrets to leading great meetings - The Asana Blog
When Bad Meetings Happen to Good People: 5 Common Meetings You'll Have at Work and How to Improve Them
Announcing Project Templates: An easier way to add new workflows to Asana: Introducing Asana templates: What they are and how to use them
4 Ways to Increase your Productivity Through Better Scheduling: 4 ways to increase your productivity through better scheduling
Why One Assignee: Why one assignee?
Asana Tips: Spring Cleaning: Asana tips: spring cleaning - The Asana Blog
Asana Tips: 7 Favorite Features for Success: 7 helpful Asana tips from the experts at Asana
Marketing-Specific:
Marketing with Asana: The tools we use: Marketing with Asana: The Tools We Use
How to use Asana to manage your social media calendar: How to use Asana to manage your social media calendar