Asana Adoption Surge

Hi @Mark_Nattress,
@Marie Thank you for the mention :wink:

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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!
  3. 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 :wink: Then they transmit information to their team.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. There will be difficult times in the deployment, but believe it, the change is never obvious but it is worth it.
  7. 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 :wink:

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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.

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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!

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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…

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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.

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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.

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So, you’ll have 30 mentors for next roll out? I’m envious… How did you identify mentors capability? Did you ask for volunteers?

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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 :wink::+1:

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@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.

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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.

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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 …

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:wave: 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 :unicorn: s, but a heartfelt “thank you” would definitely be in order.

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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!

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Congrats! Leading such 1 deployment is a great experience👏
What do you mean by “collaboration tools”?

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By collaboration tools I meant some activities, tools, or tasks that help the Mentors work together and assist new users.

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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

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Thank you all for your contributions on this thread; I’ve gone ahead and pinned it into the #team-adoption category as I’m sure it will be useful to so many other users! :slight_smile:

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Great post!!!

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I’m sorry, help me with the google translator. wow, sorry again, … i have a small experience with forums :slight_smile:

The small company I work for (20 people) has 3 main departments.

  1. Help Desk and Software Implementation Projects
  2. Custom software development and programming
  3. Hardware implementation and maintenance.

In the past, I used Trello to manage my work team. Trello became hell. When I had many boards, it was a lack of control and generated a lot of anxiety because I had the (confirmed) feeling that things were escaping me. : hot_face:
During a weekend, I migrated all the tasks and projects of my department (Help Desk Ace and Software Implementation Projects).

Previously in other companies where I worked, I already used Asana, but only for my individual management, never for teamwork, so I thought Asana would give me more control than Trello to manage my equipment. :star_struck:

It is one of the best decisions I made this year 2019. As soon as I migrated everything that my team had in Trello to Asana, my anxiety disappeared! :cohete:

My colleagues in the Custom Software Development and Programming department saw my happiness, and the department head was interested in knowing how he had achieved, since he was in a situation similar to mine before migrating to Asana.

They managed their software development projects with Google Sheets! :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
I showed him what Asana was capable of and the control and tranquility he gave me.

My partner soon included his email in our organization in Asana. He created a workspace for his Custom Software Development and Programming team.

I know Asana from 2009 - 2010 approximately, and currently in my organization I am the person who knows the operation of Asana the most.

My partner in charge of the Custom Software Development and Programming department has become an Asana enthusiast and has confessed to me that Asana has been the best thing that has happened to her this year since she also lived in anguish to find an effective tool to control All tasks and projects of your department.

I believe that the secret to a good implementation of Asana in organizations is the internal mentors, modification of whether the organization has 20 employees or 200.

In my opinion, companies that implement Asana as a project and equipment management tool must have an internal Asana Leader, normally this function is covered by people who “introduce” Asana into the company, either by their individual management or by The management of your small department.

At the same time, each department, work team or group must have at least one internal mentor who helps and trains the rest of the team in the implementation and use of Asana in their department with the support of the Asana Leader.

At this time, my colleagues in the Hardware Implementation and Maintenance department still use Trello due to lack of time to perform the migration. However, the head of the department has already been informed of the advantages of migrating his work team from Trello to Asana and of the benefits he would obtain.

As Asana’s leader in the company for the task, he offered to help them perform the migration.

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