Asana AI is your team mate and not your assistant. This is a big statement you should ensure you are getting the most out of it. At this point, treat Asana AI as your intern rather than your full time employee with 5, 10 or 15 years of experience.
Have you ever worked with an intern before? Why do you hold internships and why is it good to work with them?
I personally have supported interns through my career. They all have one attribute in common and it their curiosity to learn. Working with interns has taught me that it is a two way relationship.
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The programme in place helps them learn and grow.
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The info they gather from my team would tell me how aligned my team are with the strategy and the work at hand and what areas I need to focus on to drive better alignment.
If you are comfortable with these two principles, then carry on reading. Asana AI is for you.
Let us go through this scenario to contextualise the use case:
You have a team who are working on 5 different projects. They all belong to the same portfolio. You have established a process in place that Friday morning is the day you get all project status updates.
[Project status updates are meant to give you a high level information on the state of the work. What has progressed, what is stuck and what is going to take place in the next period. It gives you that flavour of whether you need to support the team and remove obstacles, or keep them flow going as is.]
Friday morning you got to work with a complete IT disaster that got all teams to be hands on deck to support few business recovery items. No status updates were issued and that is ok. Wednesday the following week, you are going into the executive meeting and need to have some updates on the health of your portfolio. Here i where your intern comes in handy.
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You ask your intern to go into the each of the projects, and check status updates, completed tasks within the last time period and their comments, and check what tasks are upcoming. Your intern gives you the report and you have that over view ready.
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The report looks predominantly ok. But one of the five projects, the update does not seem right. The information presented is identical to what presented to you 2 weeks ago. And you know that it is not possible to have no movement for 2 weeks on the project. So you call the project manager and discuss the update with them
What this exercise provides the intern:
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The ability to develop curiosity and read inform in multiple format from the project and provide analysis
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Gives you an idea if the projects are kept up to date or not. We all know that the use of tools is not always perfect. So if something does not sound right from the intern’s report, you can challenge it, or challenge the project manager of that particular piece of work.
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Use the information for coaching with your team
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Save your team’s time by not asking them to provide all the updates mid cycle. You only contact the one you wanted to get clarity.
Now what if the intern gave you a report and you felt that 4 out of the 5 projects are not accurate. You wouldn’t blame your intern immediately, would you? You would investigate to identify if the project work on asana has not been reflecting the true state. You would contact all of the project managers and discuss accordingly. This becomes a competency issue, not an intern issue.
This is how you use Asana AI. Your intern is curious and good at digging for info. The more your project managers keep their projects up to date, and the more you can rely on your intern, the more likely you will offer them a full time job and get them as your teammate!
You can read about smart summaries for portfolios here:
And if you want to learn more about Asana AI principles, then check out this page: Asana AI Principles • Asana
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