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Help your team adopt Asana

In This Article

Successfully implementing Asana across your team requires more than just learning features—it's about changing how people engage with, organize, and communicate about work. This article provides a structured approach to help your team adopt Asana effectively and achieve lasting success.

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The Asana way of change framework

Drawing on experience from hundreds of customer implementations, successful teams follow a structured six-step approach:

1. Define your “Why" and convene your adoption alliance

Before onboarding your teams, you will need a clear compelling answer to this question: What pain points will implementing Asana solve and how? You will also need to envision what success looks like and consider what will be possible in the future through using Asana that isn’t possible now.

Convene your Change Network

Successful implementations require the help of people who are just as bought into Asana as you are. Identify a coalition of people to support the rollout. Your Change Network should include people who are motivated to ensure success, have a diverse representation across important teams, know their teams’ processes, and can influence change. Aim for anywhere between 3 and 10 people, be strategic.

Action steps:

  • Document specific problems Asana will solve
  • Set measurable success metrics
  • Identify 2-3 team champions
  • Create a communication plan

2. Discover your current state 

Assess your team's existing work management processes, tools, and pain points. Understanding your starting point helps tailor the Asana implementation to your specific needs.

Questions to consider:

  1. How does your team currently track work?
  2. What tools are you using today?
  3. Where do communication breakdowns occur?
  4. What processes work well that you want to preserve?

3. Design your first workflow

Start with one high-impact workflow rather than trying to migrate everything at once. Choose a process that involves multiple team members and has clear deliverables. Creating a workflow will help set the standard for how people work in Asana. When considering your first workflow, it must have certain characteristics:

  • Highly collaborative: Look for processes that require a lot of collaboration, getting the most people involved. Asana will quickly improve visibility and coordination.
  • Easily templatized: Identify projects that you are using regularly. You can create project templates to streamline your workflow and save your team significant time.
  • Broken: Any process that is broken or scattered across various tools is a great candidate because Asana can quickly make the workflow more effective. Using a broken process will address pain points immediately and highlight how Asana can help you work more efficiently.
  • Business critical: Moving a process that impacts team objectives to Asana can show immediate impact.
  • Motivates Asana use: One of your key goals with rolling out Asana is getting a critical mass using Asana regularly. Look for a workflow that gets people using Asana early and often, like a request project or weekly meetings.

4. Enable your team and celebrate wins

Creating a communication and training plan is a great way to avoid common pitfalls of technology implementation.

  1. Set a 'go live' date for your kickoff. Build momentum and plan it as an exciting event.
  2. Send regular updates as you count down to your 'go live' date.
  3. Use the material you created when defining your "why Asana". Drive home why Asana is important and why now. Without the urgency, teammates won't see the necessity of changing how they work.
  4. Talk about how this was a team effort by everyone in the change network. Help teammates see how they had representation.
  5. Don't just send a few emails. Consider different mediums such as videos or chat channels so people have different ways to learn about the rollout.

Implementation tips:

  • Host a team kickoff meeting
  • Provide hands-on training sessions
  • Create quick reference guides
  • Celebrate completed tasks and milestones

5. Get set up for success

Setting conventions is essential to prevent your Asana from becoming unmanageable. Some common conventions are:

When to create what:

  • If you have a group of people new to Asana who will have multiple large efforts, create a new team (this should be pretty rare)
  • If you have a large effort (at least 10 bigger to-do’s) that involves a subset of an existing team or the whole team, create a new project within that team
  • If you have a smaller effort that logically fits into an existing project, add that task
  • To break down a task into smaller steps, use subtasks

Assigning work

One of the biggest hurdles for people getting into Asana is assigning work to someone else. Name it and normalize it; tasks can be requests, ideas, etc. It is helpful for managers to get on board with this and request their direct reports to assign them tasks.

Naming convention

Name tasks with action words, and describe what the assignee needs to do using these action words.

Due dates

Collective agreement on due date conventions will ensure work doesn't fall through the cracks. The assigner should always set a due date and note if this due date is flexible in the task description. Keep due dates up to date; if a due date is going to be missed, note this in the comments and update the task. This helps prevent people from defaulting to their old habits.

Responsiveness

Make Asana a rich and relevant place for communicating and establish it as the single source of truth. Set expectations around how often people are expected to check Asana. Encourage acknowledgment and communication that notifications have been seen.

6. Measure and expand your use

Track progress against your initial success metrics and gradually expand Asana usage to additional workflows and team members.

Some common ways to measure success:

  • Survey team members on adoption and satisfaction
  • Track task completion rates and project velocity
  • Monitor engagement metrics in Asana
  • Document time savings and efficiency gains

Additional resources

Related articles

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How to Help Your Team Adopt Asana | Asana Help Center