An entire month has concluded already and February is well underwary.
Sometime life happens when you are having fun, other times when you are not looking. Either way, I think it is a fair assumption that you should not miss out on the things that matter the most. But how do you know what matters the most?
On a personal level, I will leave that to you to reflect on. On a business level though , I believe what matters the most is the work that has the most positive impact on you, your team, and your clients. For that impact to be tangible it has to be clear. And clarity is what Asana has always promoted through its pyramid of clarity
In this post, I am not going to promote the pyramid of clarity. What I will share with you instead is why, for me, Asana is a go-to place to plan, implement, measure, track and communicate the progress of those business initiatives that matter.
In my role, I am responsible for the organisation’s assurance and improvement portfolio. My team’s work varies from regulatory audits to incident management, from error detection to internal assurance, from business process improvement to voice of customer programmes. As you can imagine, the majority of the work is not a simple check off a to-do list. The work is very much projectised and intentional. That is why Asana is core for my work.
The organisational strategy includes a standing item each year:
Improve the operational resilience for 2 key processes by eliminating as many manual steps as possible, removing bottle necks and increasing business visibility.
(Let us park this one piece of a bigger puzzle for now.)
Here is how you can use Asana to drive impact:
I always strategise top-down and bottom-up with my team. For that reason, our starting point is a project space.
Team’s Workload Project Space:
This project is treated as our intake space. Any requests from the business are logged here. We assess their priorities, impact, level of effort, before we decide whether they will be considered or not. My team has autonomy to decide, and I step in when brand new initiatives are logged in. (this is the second piece of the puzzle).
If requests are considered as a ‘GO’, the team captures their high level next steps. A work item that require weeks and months gets a brand new project created. We have a high level project template that is meant to trigger thought process and not to limit freedom to action work. This step is a way of working that utilises Asana. It is an Asana System Requirement.
Always define your way of working and make sure the system features help you. Do not build your way of working based on the system. You might have heard the term ’shoehorning’. Do not shoe horn your work!
Many teams have different ways of working, so where are we going with this?
Let us look at the pieces of the puzzle.
The first piece:
That is captured as a Goal. This makes it clear to the team that in our strategy, work that matters has to be aligned with this goal.
Do not worry about what to include and what to exclude. To to Goals, click on the plus ‘create goal’ and enter the details. That is good for now. Make sure your goal is public.
I have three Portfolios I work with daily:
1-1 Team Management portfolio: It includes all the 1-1 projects I have with my team and with other leadership peers
Governance Portfolio: It includes all projects that evolve around regulatory audits we conduct on suppliers, regulators auditing us, assurance programmes we have on operations.
Improvement Portfolio: It includes all the projects that relate to business process improvements. This is the portfolio which we keep all work relating to operational resilience tracked under.
Now that I have a goal and a portfolio, the portfolio is linked to the goal.
All the projects in this portfolio are now added to the goal as ‘connected projects’.
By doing so, I can have my goal update automatically based on the progress of the projects. Asana will give me a percentage of completion, and I can even decide on the weight each project work.
What about the second of piece of the puzzle: my team’s autonomy to decide on requests?
See, if my team does not have clarity on what matters for our department and subsequently the business, how can I expect them to make decisions that are always aligned?
Because they have visibility of our goals, they know best if a new request can be dealt with immediately, needs time but is still achievable this financial year, or it is completely brand new and they would require my review.
This autonomy is supported significantly by the clarity that asana helps us surface.
These are only two pieces of a puzzle. There is plenty more use cases involving cross departmental collaboration that comes into the mix. But for now, I ask you to go to asana, click on that ‘goals’ button and create a goal, share it with your team, and link the work that matters to it.