I’m sure this topic has been covered before, so if you’re aware of a similar predicament – please point me in the right direction.
I am not a Project Manager, but I’ve been one in the past. My Marketing Team found out that I have experience in this area and so a couple of months ago I was delegated setting up Asana for the whole team The current challenge is to get everyone participating as much as possible, but I know from tracking completed tasks that about 5 out of 30+ people use Asana regularly.
I’m pretty sure I can get everyone to input their OKRs into Asana Goals, but I’m not sure I can convince them to regularly update progress & attach projects to their goals over time. I can’t be there to handhold because I have my own job.
QUESTION: Does anyone have recommendations on how to convince people to regularly update Asana, especially if they see it as extra work?
An incomplete list of things I have tried: setting up regular check-in meetings, setting up project management “office hours”, building a simple project management playbook, making short instructional videos, showing off how easy it can be to track progress, showing how using Asana to track workloads can lead to us hiring more people and minimizing burn out, quantitatively demonstrating how project management is directly correlated to successful projects … the list goes on.
What we need is a dedicated Project Manager, but until then, this will be my challenge, and I appreciate any recommendations!
In addition to @Jason_Woods’ good answer, what about making a short form (in Asana, of course) and getting the 25+ non-users to indicate what their impediments are? It might be revealing and help guide your adoption efforts specifically. (Perhaps the last question could be: “Did you know you could create a form like this in Asana in [n] minutes and see all the results conveniently as tasks in an Asana project?”)
Here’s an additional tip: put Asana at the center of everything. For any meeting, someone shares their screen to show the Asana project, because that should be where work is happening. If it isn’t in Asana, ask why and where did the conversation happen. And slowly things should fall into place.
You might need the help of a few internal champion.
Last thing: 99% of people do not know how to use My Tasks, don’t really use Inbox, or worse believe those 2 screens are the same. So they are basically missing out on the biggest benefit Asana provides, which is personal organization.
“If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain,”
How does the team manages things right now? Via Google Sheets? Emails? Do you have access to those?
We had this issue with one client, some employees ignored pm tools. What they did is added automations and some extra tools to “mirror” emails + Google Sheets to Asana. And then gradually instead of responding to emails, started to respond in Asana, employees would a response via notification, then they responded back and then step by step they migrated.
Everybody has their own change acceptance velocity so maybe you might consider doing some hacks (while doing them, you will learn a lot of new things and grow). It all depends how invested you are yourself in this project and usage of Asana.
The current challenge is to get everyone participating as much as possible, but I know from tracking completed tasks that about 5 out of 30+ people use Asana regularly.