If you want to succeed with asana

English Forum Tips and Tricks
1

Hello everyone,

After months in testing different approaches with different teams, I would like to share my personal view on how I am making asana works for different teams and which strategies worked best.

Success Story Number 1

I feel that asana’s flexibility is amazing and I believe that if you want asana to succeed you need to have a method in place. As an early adopter I love to try new solutions, tasks/subtasks, boards, projects and so on. However, when you involve a team which is not as excited about organisation and project management, you need to have decided for one strategy. (you as asana leader).
Do you believe in using many subtasks or many projects? Do you use normal projects or boards? Tags or Custom Fields? You can do everything, but your users need to know how to do one thing.
Don’t play guinea pig with them

Success Story Number 2

Alas, am going to repeat myself saying that you need to give the asana users a method. I have seen in many users the fact that if they don’t start managing their tasks every day, they will soon be snowed under. The My Tasks is the most important functionality of asana, and the way you manage it is absolutely central to a successful asana implementation.
My personal preference go for a GTD based approach: every evening/morning I plan my day. What’s Important (long term goals) VS What’s urgent (short term goal). Pick 3/6 tasks for Today, keep a dozen in Upcoming and hide everything else using a deadline to have those tasks pop up. Clarity is my key, but whatever method you use, make sure to make it become a habit!

I have been using asana for at least five years, and nothing gave me more success in introducing it to various teams that making it simpler for user to use it. If you are championing asana in your company, you need to train the users to make the most out of asana in a way that fits in with every user’s style. Keep a company-wide approach and help users to find their flow in the My Tasks.

Any feedback much appreciated!

Good Luck

Carlo

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Hi @Carlo,

Thank you so much for sharing your learnings! These are very valuable to us and to other team leads looking to make their teams successful.

In fact, this is very much in-line with our own customer success philosophies. The more that a team leader or anyone implementing Asana can set conventions, set-up the end-to-end workflows and act as a guide for the rest of the team (especially new users) the better they are set-up for success in the long run.

This does mean that leads need to be Asana experts and also well-equipped to set-up Asana. I always recommend that a new champion starting out leverages:

Thanks again for telling us your story! Have a productive day.

Cheers,
Aisling

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Carlo! Thank you so much for sharing these ideas. Very inspiring for all of us.

I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head when you say we need to establish an Asana method on our teams to maximize their success. This point reminds me of the idea that you have to spend 3 weeks on something for it to become a habit. If we could find a way to usher our teams into an Asana activity for 3 weeks, maybe the adoption experience will be much easier. Perhaps the person leading Asana adoption on a team could host a morning meeting for 3 weeks in which everyone organizes their my tasks or everyone creates a task for their number one priority of the day in a team project. I imagine there are many additional creative ways to approach this. :slight_smile:

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