Today, you can easily collaborate with teammates and fellow employees on a global scale with task management and collaboration tools like Asana. These tools allow you to organize work, engage in direct messages, and effectively manage your business – even if your team is composed of individuals from different regions and countries.
In this Asana review…
Asana Overview
Asana is a brilliant task management and project management tool. It encourages collaboration, and it allows you to easily create a detailed workflow for the day-to-day running of your business or team.
Users can be split into teams, and you can create projects for these teams. Also, you can create detailed task lists for entire teams or individual users. These tasks can then be tracked and you can include as much or as little detail as you require.
Asana Pros and Cons
Pros
- Detailed project management tools.
- Excellent tools and features for individual task management.
- Various options for communication with team members.
- The free version is comprehensive for small businesses/teams.
- The premium pricing is affordable.
Cons
- A lack of personalized customer support.
- The interface could initially be confusing
Features
- Project creation to manage multiple teams.
- The ability to create individual tasks and boards.
- Collaboration via direct messaging and comment threads.
- Goal creation to provide incentives to employees.
- Reporting tools to monitor the progress of teams and individuals.
Asana Review – What Can You Expect From This Task Management App?
Asana is a detailed task management/collaboration tool that gives businesses an effective means to manage their employees and workflow. In this Asana review, we look at important aspects of the platform including pricing, features, and both the free and premium account utility.
Features
Asana is a platform that is primarily used for task management. It also has an array of features for self-improvement, driving performance, and monitoring employee progress. We have listed the main features of Asana below:
- Project board creation for different teams.
- Individual task assignment for employees.
- Comment threads and direct messaging for effective communication.
- Reporting to see progress and effectiveness of teams.
- Portfolio creation to assess individual team members’ workload.
- Goal creation to drive employee improvement.
At its core, Asana has a detailed task management system. You can easily create projects for different teams, and assign tasks within those projects. This makes it easy to keep track of your business and make sure that things get done.
It also has an array of useful tools to encourage development. For example, you can set goals for teams and individual users. This could be linked to a company bonus scheme as an incentive for continual improvement. Also, you have access to various reports so you can look at the progress of your teams and see if there are any poor performers.
Lastly, Asana also facilitates communication. Users within a team can engage in direct messages to solve problems or collaborate on tasks, for example. Also, the individual tasks all have comment sections. This is means that multiple people can easily share ideas and discuss the progression of their tasks.
Pricing
In this Asana review, we looked at their price structure. Asana has a simple set of price plans that is easy to understand. This also includes a decent free option which is great for small businesses. The following are the current price plans from Asana:
- Free.
- Premium: £9.49 per month.
- Business: £20.99 per month.
- Enterprise: Price available on request.
We discuss the free version in greater detail below, but in short, it allows you to have up to 15 users and up to three project boards.
The premium subscription is still great value and for just £9.49 per month, you can create unlimited project boards and benefit from the host of advanced reporting and task management features. It is certainly one of the cheaper task management options available, but the free version is also pretty solid.
Free Account Utility
Asana allows individual users to create a free account and be part of a team. There is also a free team version, in which you can create a team with up to 15 users. This does have its limitations, however.
For example, you can create unlimited projects and tasks using a free account, however, you can only create up to three separate projects. There is also none of the workflow automation for repetitive tasks. Lastly, the free version has only basic reporting – it doesn’t have an advanced search function, and you cannot create any custom fields or milestones for your teams.
Regardless, if you have a small business and simply want to manage the day-to-day tasks of your team members, the free version of Asana is a fantastic choice. One project should be more than enough to facilitate tasks for a small team of employees – you may only need multiple projects if you have a large business with multiple departments, for example.
Premium Team Subscription Utility
A premium subscription to Asana offers a host of upgrades and additional features. Firstly, you can create an unlimited number of individual projects. This gives far greater flexibility for larger businesses with multiple teams or businesses whose employees have a complex workload.
For example, let’s say that you had a business with a marketing, sales, production, and research department. You could effectively create a project for each department and assign work to individuals separately.
Aside from basic project management, Asana Premium also provides workflow automation, scaled security, and advanced reporting. The workflow automation is handy if you often have repetitive tasks or recurring jobs that have similar parameters.
Essentially, Asana Premium provides greater control and flexibility in your task management. It also makes management easier and allows you to manage your team/business in a greater depth.
Task Assignment and Management
One of the areas that Asana excels is task management. If you want to have an organized workflow and have multiple employees working on different tasks, this is an excellent tool. The main screen of the task management section is split into “tasks due soon”, and “recent projects”.
Projects are essentially individual workflows in which you can assign tasks and create different columns. We like that when looking at a project, you can switch between various views – the “board” view is possibly the easiest to follow as it splits the project by its different categories and each category has individual tasks – much like Trello.
An example of a use for a project could be a content creation team. Let’s say you have a team of five writers. You could create a workflow project in which you assign writers tasks. Within the project, each writer could have a separate column, and within that column could be their individual jobs. This makes it incredibly easy to manage multiple staff members all working on different jobs. It also helps the users themselves keep track of their work.
For each individual task, you can have different parameters that can be customized for your industry. For example, a content creation task could include items like content type, category, URL, target keyword, and competitor URL. Within each task, there is also a comment thread where users can easily interact to provide updates or instructions for the job.
I have experience using Asana in such a manner and I find the task management tools highly useful. The layout can be a little cluttered at times, but once you get used to where everything is, it really does help manage your work.
Customer Support
The customer support of Asana is not fantastic. This isn’t as important for this type of app, however, it is something that could certainly be improved. For both the free and premium plans, there is no dedicated customer support – only community support. This means that you must search through the community support forum to find answers to your problems.
Only the business plan provides access to personalized support and community support. On the Asana website, there is also a handy AI chatbot with which you can easily find answers. It provides a host of preemptive questions for both new and existing customers.
Asana Review Summary
For small businesses and online teams, Asana is a brilliant platform to use. The free version is comprehensive and offers a decent set of features and utility for smaller teams. Of course, you are limited if you need separate project workflows for multiple teams. However, if you have a smaller team with 10 or fewer users, a free Asana account could certainly cope.
We also feel that the premium versions of Asana are also of decent value. The pricing is reasonable, and the basic premium package could be suitable for larger businesses that need to manage multiple teams, with a much large volume and complexity of work.
Asana is also relatively easy to set up and manage for both users, and those who are controlling the task management. The interface could take a while to get used to, but overall, it provides a pleasant and intuitive user experience.
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