Help your team adopt Asana

Introducing a new tool to your organization can be challenging, but it can also present exciting opportunities. Using Asana is most effective when you get the entire team’s buy-in, so creating a positive framework around embracing these digital advancements is essential for a smooth transition and positive experience.

Announcing the roll out of Asana is a chance for growth and collaboration, enhancing efficiency and streamlining processes. Find out more about the Asana Way of Change below to help ensure a smooth implementation and get your team onboard.   

1. Define your “Why?”

Before onboarding your teams, you will need a clear compelling answer to this question: What pain points will implementing Asana solve and how? You will also need to envision what success looks like and consider what will be possible in the future through using Asana that isn’t possible now. 

Convene your Change Network

Successful implementations require the help of people who are just as bought into Asana as you are. Identify a coalition of people to support the rollout. Your Change Network should include people who are motivated to ensure success, have a diverse representation across important teams, know their teams’ processes, and can influence change. Aim for anywhere between 3 and 10 people, be strategic. 

2. Discover your now 

Evaluate current processes and how Asana will fit in with other tools your team is already using. Most teams have tools for creating and managing work as well as for messaging and communicating with teammates. Asana links content and communications, coordinating and tracking who is doing what and by when. Develop a team structure to lay the foundation for inviting teammates and creating projects. When setting up your team structures, ask yourself, “Who needs to be able to see and search for this work?”. 

3. Design your workflows

Identify the process of steps to accomplish work in your organization. Creating a workflow will help set the standard for how people work in Asana. When considering your first workflow, it must have certain characteristics:

Highly collaborative: Look for processes that require a lot of collaboration, getting the most people involved. Asana will quickly improve visibility and coordination. 

Easily templatized: Identify projects that you are using regularly. You can create project templates to streamline your workflow and save your team significant time.

Broken: Any process that is broken or scattered across various tools is a great candidate because Asana can quickly make the workflow more effective. Using a broken process will address pain points immediately and highlight how Asana can help you work more efficiently. 

Business critical: Moving a process that impacts team objectives to Asana can show immediate impact.

Motivates Asana use: One of your key goals with rolling out Asana is getting a critical mass using Asana regularly. Look for a workflow that gets people using Asana early and often, like a request project or weekly meetings. 

4. Enable your team and celebrate wins 

Creating a communication and training plan is a great way to avoid common pitfalls of technology implementation. 

1.  Set a 'go live' date for your kickoff. Build momentum and plan it as an exciting event.
2. Send regular updates as you count down to your 'go live' date.
3. Use the material you created when defining your "why Asana". Drive home why Asana is important and why now. Without the urgency, teammates won't see the necessity of changing how they work. 
4. Talk about how this was a team effort by everyone in the change network. Help teammates see how they had representation.
5.  Don't just send a few emails. Consider different mediums such as videos or chat channels so people have different ways to learn about the rollout.

5. Get set up for success

Setting conventions is essential to prevent your Asana from becoming unmanageable. Some common conventions are: 

When to create what:

• If you have a group of people new to Asana who will have multiple large efforts, create a new team (this should be pretty rare)
• If you have a large effort (at least 10 bigger to-do’s) that involves a subset of an existing team or the whole team, create a new project within that team
• If you have a smaller effort that logically fits into an existing project, add that task
• To break down a task into smaller steps, use subtasks

Assigning work 

One of the biggest hurdles for people getting into Asana is assigning work to someone else. Name it and normalize it; tasks can be requests, ideas, etc. It is helpful for managers to get on board with this and request their direct reports to assign them tasks. 

Naming convention

Name tasks with action words, and describe what the assignee needs to do using these action words. 

Due dates

Collective agreement on due date conventions will ensure work doesn't fall through the cracks. The assigner should always set a due date and note if this due date is flexible in the task description. Keep due dates up to date; if a due date is going to be missed, note this in the comments and update the task. This helps prevent people from defaulting to their old habits.

Responsiveness

Make Asana a rich and relevant place for communicating and establish it as the single source of truth. Set expectations around how often people are expected to check Asana. Encourage acknowledgment and communication that notifications have been seen. 

6. Measure and expand your use

Talk to your team to check what’s working and what’s not. Check in your success metrics to clarify successes and opportunities for further improvements. Don’t forget to celebrate your team’s success and share these with stakeholders. 

Some common ways to measure success: 

1. Tracking activity: See how many people use Asana and how often. 

2. Satisfaction: Collect feedback, put out surveys and see how Asana works for people, as well as find out what's not working. 

3. Demonstrate tangible impact: How has collaboration improved after rolling out Asana?