How I manage work and teams online.
Big or small, organisations are always juggling multiple projects and priorities.
Making sure there are effective ways of working to manage this workload is really important. Time and time again, I’ve seen one of the biggest punctures to staff morale is people feeling like they’re wasting their time and energy.
As a project manager, the best tool I’ve found to achieve streamlined project management is Asana. Here’s how it’s helped solve my problems:
- Optimises efficiency and ways of working
I am always looking at ways to eliminate the unnecessary and cut out the double handing of work. In my experience, that means reducing the role of email in project management. Rather than a project manager distributing tasks, timelines and updates over email, which often results in confusion, Asana enables workload alignment and empowers staff to become more accountable. All tasks are assigned to an individual, include due dates and a board for teams to share communication about task requirements. Each task can also include subtasks allowing for a multifaceted piece of work to be managed by a range of people.
- Easy to use and onboard staff
What’s the point of having a great project management tool if your colleagues find it too hard to use? That’s why choosing a tool that can be widely adopted, by tech savants and novices alike, is essential. Asana is flexible and allows you to adjust it to suit your work needs so you can spend more time doing rather than coordinating the work. I’ve onboarded a number of different teams and the common complaints have been easily resolved after the individual user is shown a few key features. To help drive usage adoption, it’s important the tool is used in conjunction with offline conversations.
- It drives workload transparency
Forget about the pen and paper to do list. Asana empowers staff to have greater transparency and ownership about what tasks they are managing. Individuals can create their own projects as well as participate in team projects. As a manager, this transparency allows me to understand my team’s workload and receive live updates about work in progress. If someone’s choc-a-bloc or has capacity, I can manage their workload for the week or month accordingly.
If you want to give Asana a go or need help optimising how your business is using the tool, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Author: Pete Zak (Asana Certified Pro – available for hire.)
