Asana is a task management tool that we, Computer Guys, use to keep track of our jobs at hand. There is a plethora of such tools in the market today and because of all the different features and design that they have it can be difficult to find the right tool for the environment we have in this company. Here is why we think Asana is the best application for us.
1. Simple, professional and clean interface.
The interface (as shown) may rub people the wrong way because it looks bland, boring and unexciting. This may be a crucial factor for people who want to start their day looking at a dynamic and exciting display of their tasks for the day. But to us, it is not as important as displaying efficiently the tasks and also allowing easy control of managing them as well. The greyscale interface displays information efficiently in a series of panels.
2. Collaboration
Collaboration is an important functionality that is required in the most basic of project management software. In Asana, this element is definitely present. If a given project is shared throughout the whole company, employees are free to comment on it and provide constructive feedback. When a given project is given to a team to complete, this application can be used to dissect the whole project into separate tasks and then efficiently assigned to members of the team. All members of the team can see how far along the individuals are in their task, so instead of just focusing on one own’s task, they can choose to contribute and help others. This openness and sharing of the workflow can help enhance the quality of work and may speed up the timeline provided for it.
3. Accessibility
Asana can be synced across Google Calendar and be managed from your email. With the syncing feature, it is a life-saver because instead of heading to different platforms/avenue to see your schedule. Everything is now based in just one Google Calendar, pretty neat. Also you will be mailed when there is any activity in the project that you are involved in, mail notification helps to keep track of events happening, instead of repeatedly logging in and out of Asana.
Personally I feel that it is very useful in the setting of our company, where collaboration is not as important as in media/design companies. Our tasks tends to be more individual based and thus this application is mainly used to keep track of all the tasking. If this application is used in a more dynamic working environment, you might be turned off by the rigidity of the application. The workflow is fixed, not allowing much flexibility when it comes to workflow process and management. It does not allow you to segment a project into different segments (e.g marketing, product development, sales) and further into sub-group of tasks.
When a company chooses to adopt a specific task management software, I think the way to go about doing it is to try out as many of them as possible. This is because there are so many different kinds of software, even the genre itself is called by a different names (e.g task management, project management, workflow management), and they all offer different features which will suit different kinds of working environment. Other than considering important factors like cost and functionality, consider also suitability. Get the application that does the work you want it to do, rather than just an application have a lot more functions but yet do not serve a purpose to your work at all.
