Asana Implementation Process: Best practices and lessons learned from different companies

Hello @Shannon_McNeil,

Thanks for the feedback! Appreciate it :blush:

Workspace Audits are important from my point of view to guarantee long term success of Asana implementation and to guarantee the compliance of the agreed Asana Convention.
It is also a great situation to further help people to integrate their processes into Asana.

I did this the first time when I worked at Home24, see the screenshot below:

So how to read it:

  • Green means everything is OK

  • Yellow means there are some smaller issues e.g. sometimes assignees are missing, or some tasks are over due which is ofter the case :slight_smile:

  • Red means there are some big issues e.g. important projects are missing, people do not stick to agreed Asana Convention

  • The color coding is to ensure that the manager and I can see easily where we have to fix first - high level overview

  • Inside the cells you find details for a better feedback, because specific feedback has more impact - and I also tell people what they are doing good and encourage them to share their best practices!

So how is the process:

  • I fill out the basics in the sheet template, which you will find below. Basics are the different departments/ teams, the responsible heads, if these people had previous Asana experience and which trainings they and there teams have participated in

  • Then the real work takes place and I dig deep into the team with their projects and tasks: I look for issues which are usually no assignees, no due dates or past due dates, missing objectives and pros and cons in task descriptions, missing files attached, important tasks not in the roadmap etc… ; And I check other things which we have agreed on in the Asana Convention Workshop.

  • Afterwards, I do 1on1s with the team leads, I find it important not to do a public blaming email with all the issues etc. the Results of the Workspace Audits are for the overall manager and me only. In the 1on1s I ask the heads about their experience so far with Asana and give them some feedback. During these 1on1s most of the heads asked very specific questions how they can implement certain processes into Asana which we will also clarify during the meeting if an immediate solution is obvious :astonished:

  • I encourage the heads to share their learnings and best practices in a “Success or best practice meetings” since this keeps the “Momentum” alive

Such a Workspace Audit should be done ideally after 2, 4 and 12 weeks.

Workspace Audit template (is constantly adapted and improved):

At REWE Digital, I did not have time to do these Workspace Audits and it resulted in: People not sticking to the Convention, teams using Asana differently, many overdue tasks or not assigned tasks :dizzy_face:

I hope this helps!

@paulminors, @Todd_Cavanaugh Since you two are also doing Workspace Audits, what is your opinion about it? What do you do differently? How often do you do it?

All the best,
Sebastian

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@Sebastian_Paasch very interesting approach, thanks for sharing.

I agree, it’s important to audit your account, particularly after just getting started, to make sure you have everything set up correctly and important details like assignee’s/due dates added to tasks.

From here, I like to keep things quite simple. Set up a recurring task to review the project set up on a regular (monthly/quarterly) basis. I also encourage people to review and tidy their mytasks and any important projects as part of closing out the week (again, this can be set up as a recurring task).

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@alexis Like the look of that 5 minute journal will get one for my Wife…

@Sebastian_Paasch Thanks So much for the fabulous post and the ideas and detail you have put into it. Makes great reading and I will be definitely looking at putting some of your approach in place…

Jason.

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Many thanks, @Sebastian_Paasch. This is an incredibly useful post. We’re currently rolling out Asana to our team, and I’m relieved to see that we’ve already done some of the things you’ve suggested. We have a number of sub-teams, and getting one person from each of those on-board and trained early on has been key to a (so far!) successful roll-out.

We’ve also set up a Top tips and FAQs project, which has been a useful way of heading off concerns and answering common questions early on.

I’ll definitely take your advice in other areas as we move forward. Thanks again for sharing all of this.

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@Sebastian_Paasch, whoa. This is awesome! Thank you!

I’m curious how you were able to push past objections regarding JIRA and more robust reporting. Asana is an excellent tool, but as mentioned in previous posts by many others, it’s not quite there in regards to reporting. My management team requires more advanced insight into what’s happening with projects, where and why delays are occurring, and at risk projects (to name a few). They also need the ability to see the potential consequences of pushing a deadline back (specifically using GANTT charts) and a report on the full history of when a project was supposed to start vs. when it was actually completed.

All that said, with your experience, how would you respond to these stakeholder’s concerns/requests?

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HI @Dan_Olson,

We need to accept that JIRA is still more powerful and usually better suited for IT teams, at least the IT teams I have worked with so far. So I do not argue with IT teams that they should switch to Asana.
BUT if the IT team says, you (the non-IT teams) do not need Asana because you can work with JIRA or JIRA Core, which was created for non IT teams, I say no.
I ask them why they love JIRA, and they say “It is a perfect fit for IT teams with all the tools and the marketplace”, and I say “yes, and exactly this is Asana for non-IT teams, plus it has a UI/design people like to work with”, and this aspect of liking the tool is quite important and underestimated by so many managers. But everyone can easily relate to it, what you do not like, you do not use!
People need to accept that different teams have different requirements for their tools, so we need different tools. And if the same people then say, we have data silos, I say no, with tools like Unito or Tray.io everything stays in sync. So before proposing these hypothesis people should do their research.

For a coder, and I coded myself during my studies, the UI of a project management tool is not important usually, I mean if you take a look at JIRA you know what I mean, but for non-IT people it is. And if I look at JIRA Core, which is basically JIRA with less functionality, so that non-IT people do not freak out, it is not exiting people - it does not spark to realize ideas. So among other reasons they will not really use it. But if not everybody uses it, you need to use JIRA Core together with email, other tools and so on, consequently it will not save time but will create more confusion.
Asana is sexy and especially fun things like :heart: and :unicorn: make people smile. And this is an important point to get peoples buy-in.

After having said this, I would ask your supervisors, what is most important to you:

  1. That you have a perfect report of projects which have not be finished in time, because people lost overview and motivation.
  2. Or do you want to have a decent 80% report about a project which was accomplished in time with people smiling, because everyone likes to use the same tool.

And if the answer is 1. - then I would start thinking if you want to work for this manager :slight_smile:

Yes, but the current reporting especially combined with add-ons like Instagantt and SprintBoards makes the reporting sufficient for most managers.

Here applies something from product teams, they say, do not ask customers for specific features, ask them what they need - but find the solution/feature on your own. Because customers often ask for features, but they do not know if it is the one to fulfill their needs at its best and they do not know the interdependencies with other product features.
So I would ask your manager, what do they need to see and know at which time and most important what would they do with the information! I my last years in different companies, I have seen douzens of different reports which took hours in creation and where not used at all, more worse, most people did not understand them.
This led to a awesome decision of one of my former supervisors. He once asked in the weekly meetings about all our standard reports we created every week a and month and the ones which no one read - surprise :slight_smile: - or no one took actions on, were simply not produced anymore. And guess what? We had plenty of hours more every week to get things done!
So create a quarterly recurring task and add it to your “Recurring Tasks Project” to question reports: Do we use them? Does the benefit justify the time to create? What was the last important decision we tool based on this report?

This is possible with https://www.instagantt.com/

This can be simply added as info in the project description or in a project conversation if managers are afraid that someone might “edit” the dates.

If managers want to much reporting and do not trust their employees enough I usually recommend this book here: Leading with the Brain: The 7 Neurobiological Factors to Boost Employee Satisfaction and Business Results . It shows based on experience and many scientific studies how not trusting your people results in dumber and demotivated people.
The solution is easy, trust and empower your people and they will be more happy and more productive.

I hope this helps,
Sebastian

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@Sebastian_Paasch, thank you so much for the insight here. This is excellent information. I’m seeing many similarities in the scenarios you are describing relating to reporting behaviors and agree 100%. Many of the features that have been requested have already proven to be unhelpful. In fact, our team has already decided to move away from Liquid Planner :joy:.

Here’s where I’m at:

  • Someone else wanted to take a crack at finding the solution, so I bowed out. Whew! :relieved:
  • I’m going to continue using Asana for my projects and lead by example. When they see how I manage projects, maintain deadlines, and follow through on action items, they may just ask me how I do it!

Thanks again for this info - really great stuff.

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Just curious, how does our team get in touch with you about team trainings?

Hi Jeff,

First of all very welcome to the Asana Community, I saw you just joined.
If you want to discuss further details regarding your Asana setup best is if you write me an email:
sebastian@asana-consulting.com

Best,
Sebastian

For what it’s worth, we’d also love to see the conversations about Asana here in the Community! The more knowledge sharing and peer to peer learning we can have here, the better. :heart_eyes:

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@Mark_Hudson Would you be willing to share your Top Tips or FAQs?

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Helpful Asana FAQs from a Community expert

Hi @Sebastian_Paasch, do you have some examples of important points that people should agree on?

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Excited to get input from, @Sebastian_Paasch and in the meantime @Millor_Machado, there are some suggestions on conventions to set in this Guide article here.

Thanks for the article @Kaitie! I’ll check it out.

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This is awesome, thank you very much for that insightful report!

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Spectacular report on how to implement Asana in organizations.

As an Evernote Certified Consultant, the implementation process is practically the same.

First of all, you have to discover the pains of the different teams of the company, develop a resolution proposal and present it to the team leaders to convince them.

From here, if team leaders are motivated to implement the solution, the rest is practically on wheels.

:aplaudir:

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Hi Sebastian,

First, thanks very much for that insightful summary, it is VERY USEFUL!

As a consultant, I have to implement Asana for a pilot in two departments of a company, starting with one group of 10 people in each department, then to the rest of the two departments (30 people per department).

How many users would you train during the Lead User training and during the Normal user training?
Would you do the Lead user directly with 10 people, then one group of 20 for the normal users?

Thank you very much in advance for your help :slight_smile:

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This is a great read! Thank you!

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Excellent post! It’s also good to see that we are making our way through many of these points in our implementation. The workplace audit for convention compliance will be key and the new feature that Asana will make available to have Team admins will really help with that. At least I hope so :slight_smile:

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