Implementing Asana: Train and Implement by Organization or by Department/Group within Organization?

Hello,

I’m creating an Asana Implementation Plan and Timeline for my organization. The resources provided by Asana (Webinars, Team Onboarding Checklist, Powerpoint Templates, etc.) are fantastic and an integral part of my implementation plan.

Through this process, I still have one question that is keeping me from solidifying my implementation plan.

That question is: When creating the “Why Asana” statement and assembling an adoption alliance and following the steps in Asana Way of Change, should I do this uniformly through multiple trainings for my entire organization? Or should I break my training down by department/team so that their “Why Asana” statement is specific to their team and the training will be more customized to their needs and usage.

Obviously conducting the training by team will be more work and somewhat duplicative for me, but the perceived benefit is that it will be more specific and intimate to how that specific team will use Asana. Am I overthinking this though and could accomplish the same results training the entire organization in multiple training sessions?

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I think you are thinking about this perfectly! Love the intentionality to ensure a successful adoption plan. My suggestion would be to consider a 30k foot overview training to “set the table” for the organization (a broader WHY statement). As a part of this share-out make a commitment to provide a more personalized training for each discipline/department (sharing a WHY statement for each). This is a bit more time consuming, but I think it is equally important for everyone to see the “big picture” as it is important for them to see why it matters to their direct means of contribution. The good news is while it creates a bit more work for you, you can control what is shared at each level to remove any redundancy.

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Absolutely agree with Jerod’s comment! I also recommend you joining one of our free Roll out Asana to your team - #14 by Emily_Roman workshops.

In this virtual workshop you will:

  • Learn best practices for rolling out Asana, along with common pitfalls to avoid
  • Get the tools to show your team how Asana will help them and how it fits alongside your other tools.
  • Consider the Asana conventions you want to define for your team or company
  • Leave with a tailored onboarding plan and resources to put it into practice

I hope this helps! :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the suggestion, Jerod. I like that top-down approach and will consider that when finalizing my implementation timeline. Cheers!

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Thank you so much for bringing this up Brian. I have been having a similar issue with my org and have attempted to do the adoption as an org which only caused more confusion and raised more questions. Each dept. Saw Asana in a different way and even in the adoption alliance it caused confusion on how they saw the role. I felt like doing it by dept. Would have served our whole organization better. My only question is how big is your overall group and the average size of each department?

Hi Saph,

I’m glad to hear this discussion is relevant to your situation also. Our entire organization has about 20 people who would use Asana. Some departments would have 4-7 people, while others could have as few as 3. I’ve asked my department heads if they would be interested in sharing a training with another similar department (similar in function and size). So far, this suggestion has been well-received.

Parts of our marketing and customer experience teams will train together. Parts of operations and finance teams will train together. Coincidentally, we’ve found that the teams training together are also the teams that work most co-departmentally so we’ve already identified training topics that will address immediate issues between communicating tasks and project statuses between departments.

This information is incredibly helpful. Our org is about the same size with departments grouped together in a similar way. Our Programs and Quality dept. Work closest with out Growth and Partnerships dept. While Dev. And Communications work with Growth and Partnerships equally as much but in a different manner. Finance, Operations, and HR have fewer cross departmental projects but more process’s that Asana is useful for. I am going to suggest this approach to my teams and see how they feel about it but, I feel like it could remedy a lot of the issues we’ve had with our adoption. Thanks for the info.