Using Asana to plan business goals and objectives for the new year

Use Cases
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#1

Planning business goals and objectives for the new year: do you use Asana for it? How?

At Asana, we use a lot of projects for reference (not necessarily actionable tasks) and will do this for our goals and objectives for the year.

This is helpful so you can easily figure out who’s responsible for driving an initiative forward and creating clarity around what we as a company are trying to achieve – it’s also really satisfying to check them off at the end of the year. We’ll then post regular status updates on company goals throughout the year, set milestones for each goal, and make sure they’re all visible to everyone at the company (comment only projects comes in handy for this!)

Is there anything you do differently? Any tips you’ve discovered along the way that help you plan your goals and objectives using Asana?

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#3

What we have done within the IT group at my company is to align the IT action steps and annual targets to the company’s strategic goals. We have created a coding system such that each project (annual target) has a custom field with the corresponding code. The IT strategic plan is a published table and simplifies the coding process—the goal is numbered and the action step is lettered. Each project (annual target) is assigned to a project owner with the start date set. We identify all IT action steps at the beginning of the year and add them into Asana. There is also a code for unplanned projects.

We also add other custom fields to track hard savings and man hours saved for relevant projects during a fiscal year.

The idea is that at the end of the year we can report on the efforts towards the company’s strategic goals and objectives.

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#4

Thanks for such a detailed response, Eric – that sounds both complex and well-organized. How do you do your end of year reporting on this? Export to CSV?

#5

I am planning to export to CSV.

We established some standards for project creation and each project has a “timeline” task that contains the project coding (custom) field and the project duration (start and target date which we keep aligned with the project target date). I have created a report in Asana that pulls each timeline task (based on having the goal ID field not being empty) it is the report I will export as it only grabs projects aligned with Company goals/objectives.

If there are values tied to other custom fields (hard $$ saved, man-hours saved, etc.) I intend to sum them up.

I would really like to use PowerBi, however, I have not had success getting the custom fields into the tool.

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#6

And for people tracking this topic, there’s now a guide article on strategic planning:

https://asana.com/guide/examples/exec/strategic-planning

… an Asana Academy series:

https://academy.asana.com/company-goals-and-objectives

…and here’s also a slightly different way to track company/team objectives (also using Portfolios):

https://youtu.be/eKODHHg5yL0

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#7

Great references and nice new video, @Daniel_Iversen!

@Jessie_Beck, this is the approach I use and recommend to my clients (especially if Business Plan is not an option for them):

OKR Tracking in Asana Use Cases

I spent time a few months ago designing a quite powerful and very flexible solution for my clients to handle either OKRs or Goals/KPIs (and initiatives generally), that is quick to implement and maintain weekly or monthly, and works company-wide with roll-ups at the company- and department-levels. An optional third tier, sub-department-level, is optionally available too. Unlike Portfolios which requires the Business tier, this solution only requires Premium, and it even offers a key feature–int…

Larry

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