Asana - Highly Customizable Project Management

Asana - Highly Customizable Project Management

Asana is a project management software that aims to help small businesses or individuals manage workflows. Asana is very accessible, making it one of the best project management apps for managing tasks, workflows, and projects.

Overall, Asana is pretty flexible; integrating with other platforms further adds to the user experience, making it possible to bring all of your business tools into a single platform.

Key features include boards, timeline, reporting, automation, forms, calendar, portfolios, workload, and integrations.

Table of Contents

1. User Interface
2. Platform Availability
3. Features \ a. Projects \ b. Timeline \ c. Reporting \ d. Automation \ e. Calendar \ f. Portfolios \ g. Workload \ h. Milestones \ i. Integrations
4. Pricing
5. Is Asana Suitable for My Business?

User Interface

Asana has a modern and sleek user interface. Overall the user experience is both enjoyable and intuitive, making it one of the best project management tools for non-technical users. The software successfully implements a wide range of features without overcomplicating the platform. If you have never used a project management tool before, Asana provides a smooth entry point for any user.

Platform Availability

Asana is available in browser or as a mobile or desktop app. All of the features work well regardless of the platform, making managing your team straightforward whether in the office or on the go.

Features

Projects

Projects are the main feature of the platform. They let you organize your work into sections allowing for a more visual representation of the workflow. 

Creating projects is very streamlined. The platform provides an excellent range of premade sections. When adding a section, you can set its progress to "Ready," "In Progress," or "Done." Adding progress stamps to each section further streamlines the workflow and makes it easy for team members to see which project areas should be prioritized.

After adding a few sections, the next step is to fill them with individual tasks. As with sections, tasks are also highly customizable, and you can even choose to add a cover image to each task.

Timeline

The timeline gives an overview of how your project is progressing. Timelines can help you find ways to increase workflow, plan projects, and, most notably, hit your deadlines. 

Planning projects with a timeline makes it easy for team members to understand the structure of the project. Overall it opens more opportunities for collaboration and adaptation when there are changes to the project's structure.

Reporting

Dashboards

Dashboards give an overview of progress across teams and projects—without having to check each task manually. Progress overviews can also be shared with your team, helping everyone understand how each project is progressing.

Charts and Graphs

Charts and Graphs make it easier to troubleshoot problems through visualizations. Asana highlights the areas of your projects that could be improved. It then lets you filter and click on any data point to automatically take you to the related projects to optimize them as needed.

Chart Templates and Builder

Charts are not just for the project manager. The chart templates and builder allows all of your team members to create their own custom charts based on any project aspect. Starting with a template makes it straightforward to create a highly visual chart; more experienced users can also build custom charts, which can help them analyze the project to derive critical insight to make powerful data driven decisions.

Real-Time Updates

All reporting in Asana is updated in real-time, meaning there is no waiting for important analytics on your project and workflow.

Automation

Rules

Rules allow you to automate repetitive tasks, which is a great way to increase productivity across the board.

The custom rules builder is straightforward, allowing you to automate processes in just a few clicks.

Asana also lets you save common projects as templates, enabling you and your team to save a lot of time organizing recurring projects.

Forms

Forms are a fundamental part of every Asana project. When someone fills out a form, it will show up as a new task in the project it is connected to.

You can customize the name of your form and add a custom description to give instructions to anyone using it.

If required, forms can prompt the user for their name and email, ensuring that you get the relevant contact information of the people requesting work.

Calendar

Each of your projects comes with a calendar view, which is excellent for keeping track of important deadlines and milestones. Team Calendars are also available and can give more insight into your project.

Portfolios

Portfolios display all your projects in one place. You can organize your portfolios to focus on specific tasks or show your most important projects. Portfolios are a great way to monitor each project in real-time and find ways to improve. 

Workload

As the name suggests, the workload feature allows you to manage your team's workload in real-time. 

Workload also lets you assign values to tasks, like hours or points, making it easier to estimate the effort they require and make sure the work is evenly distributed across your team.

Reassigning and rescheduling tasks is made easy through the drag and drop interface and can help ensure that every task is completed on time.

Milestones

Milestones can be used to tag specific points in the timeline of any project. Any task can be marked as a milestone, making it easy to set short-term targets and outline the significant stages of a project.

Integrations

Asana is pretty flexible out of the box. For users looking to get more out of the platform, integrations provide a way of doing so. At the time of writing, Asana currently integrates with over 100 popular third-party platforms, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Office 365, Salesforce, and Trello.

Asana has a vast public API with plentiful documentation. Its powerful API is too often an untapped superpower that can convert Asana into a power hub for your whole business, integrating with all of your other platforms. To learn more about how custom Asana integrations can take your business to the next level, fill out the contact form below to connect with expert engineers at DataCose.

Pricing

Asana offers a range of pricing tiers. Each pricing package comes with its own unique features; it's essential to review each package before purchasing. A brief overview of each pricing tier is shown below:

Basic (Free) - Great for individuals or teams that want to test the platform

• Unlimited tasks
• Unlimited projects
• Unlimited messages
• Unlimited activity log
• Unlimited file storage (100MB per file)
• Collaborate with up to 15 teammates
• List view projects
• Board view projects
• Calendar view
• Assignee and due dates
• Project Overview
• Project Brief
• iOS and Android mobile apps
• Time tracking with integrations
• 100+ free integrations with your favorite apps

Premium ($13.49 per person per month)

• Timeline
• Unlimited Dashboards
• Reporting across unlimited projects
• Advanced search
• Custom fields
• Unlimited free guests
• Forms
• Rules
• Milestones
• Admin Console
• Private teams & projects

Business ($30.49 per person per month)

• Portfolios
• Goals
• Workload
• Custom rules builder
• Forms branching & customization
• Approvals
• Proofing
• Lock custom fields
• Advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, Power BI

Enterprise (Custom pricing)

Enterprise is more geared towards large businesses, custom pricing is available and the Asana support team will be able to give you a quote based on the size of your business.

It’s also worth noting that Asana offers an annual subscription plan, which saves you around 20% on the subscription costs.

Is Asana Suitable for My Business?

Asana's user-friendly interface, along with its flexibility, make it a great project management platform suitable for team-based work, as well as personal task management. 

The platform provides a lot of features that can be added to through the use of integrations. 

If you want to try out Asana, they offer a 30-day free trial for both the premium and business packages. 

If you have any additional questions about whether Asana is the right tool for your business or how it can be extended through custom automations or API integrations, please complete the contact form below to connect with our engineers.