What Is Asana Project Management Tool & How Does It Work

What Is Asana?

Asana is similar to other task and project management software which allow teams to organize, collaborate, plan, and execute tasks. It acts as a perfect companion to overcome chaos and meet deadlines. It is a web-based task management and collaboration tool which eliminates the email mess and brings all tasks together. Teams can use Asana to keep track of all tasks, collaborate with other team members, exchange related files, and more.

The tool is widely used by various famous companies like Deloitte, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox. Asana is becoming a favorite among industry giants due to its numerous project management and collaboration features. It is used by millions of individuals in 195 countries and is expanding globally.

Asana for Project Management: How Does It Work?

Individuals and teams can use Asana to break down large work into manageable tasks. It's a comprehensive work management tool that allows you to track project and task progress, share files, comments, and notes, and keep track of deadlines. It is a modern method of working together in collaboration. Asana, as already mentioned above, is a task management software that has certain features like projects, workspaces, tasks, and sections to manage projects and tasks related to several clients and teams. 

Asana is mainly designed for teams to spend less time writing emails, meetings, and working on the assigned tasks. The Asana project management tool helps its users to work faster and take on interesting goals. 

Workspaces

Workspaces are nothing but shared work areas where users can collaborate on tasks and projects. These are the primary building blocks of your Asana tool. You can create different workspaces for different clients or teams separately.

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Projects

After workspaces, you will get a space where you can see a series of projects. They are your organization's main units, which can be both private and public. You can color-code them and filter them in your project section based on tags, assigned people, and priority.

Tasks

This level of work organization in Asana is to-dos. You may create tasks, fill them with a variety of information, and keep your workload balanced.

Calendar

The calendar section in Asana allows you to view all your pending tasks. You can quickly switch between 'list view' and 'calendar view' on the Asana calendar to see which tasks are due and when.

Even though Asana includes capabilities that provide everything you need to stay in sync, some teams are looking for Asana alternatives since Asana project management has failed to become the ultimate solution due to its pricing and a variety of other valid reasons.

Asana Features

Communication Tools

Your inbox helps in tracking all your messages and their associated tasks. You can even attach tasks to messages and use project conversations to continue ongoing discussions. You may also proof photographs and PDFs, and any comments you make can be turned into tasks, so the rest of the team knows what needs to be fixed.

Different Ways To View Work

As Asana is mainly designed to adapt to your workforce, it provides various ways to view your tasks and projects:

• List: View and group your tasks in a grid format.
• My tasks: Here, you can see all your tasks in a to-do list format.
• Calendar: It shows a list of tasks to be completed within a deadline.
• Board: It shows your upcoming tasks in a bulletin board-style format.
• Inbox: It contains a list of your conversations.
• Files: Groups together all the files that are uploaded to the project.

Management and Reporting Tools

If you are a manager of your team, reporting tools of Asana will make it easier for you to keep project updates organized and send update reminders when needed. You can also set “goals” to keep everyone on the same page and “milestones” to motivate and encourage their hard work.

You can also use status updates for projects and portfolios to swiftly communicate with your team and use your Dashboard to see the status of all active projects and tasks at a glance and identify issue areas if necessary.

Creating teams will allow you to group people together to work on a single project. The team section comprises an overview tab where you can track projects and a messages tab for announcements and group conversations. 

You can add teammates as followers to projects that aren't allocated to them to keep them updated and alert them if there are any issues that they can help with. 

Administrators have privacy controls. You can use permissions and other privacy measures to restrict access to specific tasks or even hide some teams that perform sensitive work.

Easy App Integration

Asana's app integration is one of the features that makes it simple to use. Several other apps also function well with Asana, the most notable ones being-

• Power BI, Microsoft Team, Zoom, Outlook, Gmail, and Slack for Communication.
• Adobe Creative Cloud, OneDrive, Office365, Box, Google Drive, and Dropbox for file creation and sharing.
• Harvest, which is an in-built time tracker tool.

Asana for Project Management: Pros and Cons

Pros

The following are the pros of Asana:

• The design of the interface of Asana is attractive
• An easy to use calendar synced with all of your tasks
• Possible to view your personal tasks in a single place
• Email integration

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Cons

The following are the cons of Asana:

• There is no simple method to keep track of all items across several projects that are due on the same day or week.
• Since this application is mainly text-based, it's common for the structure to be broken, a job to be removed, or the task's name to be changed.
• It does not allow you to assign multiple people to the same task.
• With so many duties in one location, the process might get slow.
• Because Asana lacks time-tracking capabilities, you'll need to use an external time-tracking program.

Conclusion

Asana is a flexible workplace content management system (CMS) that can be tailored to meet the demands of a wide range of businesses. It is a sophisticated project management tool. To use this tool seamlessly and master its working, you can enroll in Simplilearn’s Post Graduate Program in Project Management course that covers strategizing and management - project, program, risk, quality, complexity management, customer-centric digital transformation, PMO implementation, and agile and scrum skills.