As your company grows, you’ll have ever more tasks, projects and actions on your to-do list. Yet, one recent survey found that 46% of business owners are still managing projects and tasks via email, paper lists, endless meetings and confusing spreadsheets. This approach means it’s way more likely that delays occur, tasks are forgotten, and details slip through the cracks. This is where Asana is perfect for your start up.
In the past, the only specialized project management software available would have been heavy, complex and expensive products like Microsoft Project. Fortunately, the recent explosion of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms means entrepreneurs can use low-cost, cloud-based productivity tools to manage tasks for themselves and their employees.
Asana was launched in Beta in 2011 by two ex-Facebook employees, and is now used by over 20,000 paying customers, making it one of the leading tools in the SaaS project management market. So, is Asana right for your small business?
What is Asana?
Asana is a cloud-based platform where you and your employees can manage and delegate projects and tasks.
At the most basic level, Asana lets you create a list of projects for yourself and your employees. Each project has a project owner who can then delegate individual sub tasks to team members. Once one employee’s task is complete, they can tick it off, then pass work onto the next employee in the project. In addition to dishing out tasks, Asana allows you to add comments to a specific task within the project, so that employee can find out any extra information about their task.
This set up makes Asana highly flexible. In theory, it could be used by teams of almost any size, and who work on almost any kind of project. Whether you’re designing software, creating marketing content or employing new staff, a project with its subtasks could be designed in Asana to fit around your needs.
It also comes with decent mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Asana pricing
There is a free, basic version of Asana which allows up to 15 users. Above this, it goes up to $119.88 per user when billed annually (or $11.99 per user when billed monthly).
What is Asana like to use?
I’ve been using Asana on and off for a few years now, and in my experience, it’s a solid, reliable and easy to use tool – I couldn’t imagine working in a team without it.
Here are my pros and cons of Asana:
Pros of Asana
- The interface is simple and easy to understand. Every morning, you can review your task list for the day, and you check off your work and see your progress. It saves a lot of back and forth and hunting through emails for tasks your colleagues have asked you to complete, meaning you’re less likely to forget jobs.
- It’s easy to add new projects – either a one-off for myself, or which I would need to collaborate on with colleagues.
- There’s also a lot of visibility built into the product – I can easily see what my colleagues and team members are doing, meaning that if they’re maxed out, I know not to hand them any more work
- In terms of customizability, there is some space for your personality. You can change the view from your task list to your monthly calendar, and can also change the background and theme. Oh, and occasionally there are cutesy unicorns who whizz across the screen when you complete a task (but you can turn that off if it’s not your thing).
Cons of Asana
- Some parts of Asana are a little buggy, such as the strange scrolling that happens when you open a task in the calendar view. It’s hardly a killer, yet these bugs can make for minor irritation
- While Asana is reasonably easy to get used to, it does take a little learning curve, and new users often make mistakes which can mean essential tasks don’t get done
- I have sometimes notices that when using Asana, people can forget the bigger picture. They become so used to just receiving their personal tasks, which they then tick off as complete, meaning they don’t take responsibility for the wider project
- While Asana is often billed as a project management tool, this isn’t really what the product is about – you don’t get Gantt charts or any of the traditional features you’d expect of PM software
- It doesn’t have native time tracking, so if you bill by the hour, this might be a drawback
Should your start-up use Asana?
Asana is great for dishing out tasks in organizations which have quite a lot of process-based work, where within projects there are a number of sub-tasks carried out by individuals. It’s perfect for flexible startups which will have a lot of small tasks. It also feels like a great tool for companies with a creative side to what they do, but it’s not going to really do the trick for a sales-led business or companies with lots of front line workers, for instance.
Asana is great if: you are a start-up which has several ongoing projects and clients, and enough employees to make it worthwhile having a task delegation tool.
Asana is not so great if: you are in the business of running larger projects which need resource allocation, regular reporting and so on; Asana just won’t offer the power and control you need.
Asana is one of a wave of relatively new SaaS project management tools aimed squarely at helping small businesses allocate work more effectively, save time and boost productivity. It’s cheap, easy to use and flexible, and so there’s no surprise it’s hugely popular among entrepreneurs. So, if you’re part of the nearly 46% of small businesses who still manage all their projects manually, Asana could definitely play a big role in helping you automate task allocation and boost productivity.
