Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

January 2024

Project portfolio management 101

Project portfolio management helps you organize data and highlight crucial information during project life cycles inside each portfolio, which saves time and increases efficiency. In this article, learn how you and top-level executives can get a bird’s-eye view of all your business project life cycles and remove barriers to high-level performance. If you manage various initiatives across different teams and departments, you know how hard capturing and sharing results can be.

What is a flowchart? Symbols and types explained

A flowchart is the perfect way to visualize a complex process for your team. There are over 30 standardized symbols you can use to create a flowchart. These symbols can indicate anything from a process to a document or decisions that need to be made. In this article, you’ll learn what the different shapes mean, when a flowchart can be useful, and what types of flowcharts you can implement at work. A flowchart is a diagram that illustrates the steps, sequences, and decisions of a process or workflow.

Marketing campaign management: 7 steps for success

Marketing campaign management is the process of coordinating all the moving pieces of a campaign, from planning to launch. Learn why effective campaign management is essential, and how to streamline your process into seven key steps. Marketing campaigns can be big, unwieldy projects. With many stakeholders, teams, and deliverables to coordinate, launching a successful campaign can feel like a herculean task. But it doesn’t have to be so hard.

What is creative production? The 6-step process

Creative production is the process of transforming creative concepts into tangible outputs. Learn how to bring creative visions to life in six steps. Cutting through the market noise with high-quality creative assets is essential to setting your brand apart. Whether it’s captivating video content, compelling graphics, or innovative digital campaigns, every creative asset is a chance to capture your audience’s attention—and keep it.

Burnout: 20 signs, causes, and how to prevent it

Burnout happens when the stress or pressure from work reaches a tipping point—it either becomes too much or goes on for too long. While burnout is surprisingly common (71% of knowledge workers experienced burnout at least once in 2020), you’re empowered as a manager to prevent and reverse it within your team. Read on to learn about the signs of burnout, what causes it, and most importantly—how to prevent it. As a team lead, the last thing you want is for a team member to feel burnt out.

Work Innovators: Predictions to transform your organization in 2024

What will be the most influential change in how organizations work smarter in 2024? Four future of work experts - Greg Wells, Ph.D., Kelly Monahan, Ph.D., Daan van Rossum, and Rebecca Hinds, Ph.D. - discuss and debate their top predictions. Find out which prediction will rule them all!

What is resource management? A guide to getting started

Resource management is the process of planning and scheduling your team’s resources and activities—essentially anything that helps you complete a project. Developing a resource management plan can give you visibility into team member workloads. Learn how to manage resources and improve team performance. Making sure your team doesn’t feel overworked or underutilized is a challenge you’ll often face as a leader. It's easy to lose sight of your team's workload and bandwidth.

What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. In this article, we'll guide you through the strategic planning process, including why it's important, the benefits and best practices, and five steps to get you from beginning to end.

What is a bill of materials (BOM)? Free template and examples

Like the ingredient list on a recipe card, a bill of materials (BOM) lists what's required to complete a project. Though typically used for product manufacturing, BOMs can benefit software developers, engineers, and even marketing and sales teams. In this guide, we’ll cover the different benefits, types, and best practices for writing your bill of materials.

4 steps to create an effective employee onboarding process

An onboarding process is a structured approach to welcome new hires and set them up for success. When done right, onboarding helps new employees learn quickly, grow in their roles, and understand why their work matters. Learn about the benefits of great onboarding and how to achieve them, plus create your own onboarding process with four simple steps.

Free SOP template: A standard operating procedures guide

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) map out how your company or team performs a specific procedure or work process. You can use SOPs to improve communication and consistency among team members and make training easier for new hires. Read on to learn how to write an SOP. The most efficient teams have processes for everything, from best practices to naming company file folders. Teams perform these processes routinely and get better at them over time.

Timeboxing: The goal-oriented time management technique

Timeboxing is a simple but efficient time management method where you set an allotted time to work on a task, then evaluate your progress afterward. This gives you valuable control over your schedule. Because the timeboxing technique is so versatile, you can apply it to both project management tasks and your day-to-day to-do lists. We’ve all had that 30-minute task that spirals out of control and takes up a whole day’s work.

What's new in Asana | January 2024

Welcome to the January edition of What’s New in Asana. First, increase the visibility between work and the goals they support with connected goals in the Portfolio view. Next, gain additional control over your projects by adding or clearing a date custom field in rules. Finally, group tasks differently across List and Board views in projects and My Tasks.

How to create a perceptual map: Perceptual mapping template

A perceptual map is a chart used to illustrate where a product or brand and its competitors are positioned according to consumer perception. Learn how your brand can unlock industry insights through perceptual maps and identify paths into new marketplaces. When it comes to positioning your brand or product in the marketplace, consumer perception is king. But for marketers, it can be difficult to distinguish between your actual position and where you perceive yourself to be.

What is a contingency plan? A guide to contingency planning

A business contingency plan is a backup strategy for your team or organization. It lays out how you’ll respond if unforeseen events knock your plans off track—like how you’ll pivot if you lose a key client, or what you’ll do if your software service goes down for more than three hours. Get step-by-step instructions to create an effective contingency plan, so if the unexpected happens, your team can spring into action and get things back on track.

What is resource allocation? Learn how to allocate resources

Project managers and teams can struggle to make balanced resource allocation decisions, often opting for too much or too little. But the key to navigating this delicate balance is continuous adjustment and real-time responsiveness to project needs. This approach ensures that resources are optimally utilized, preventing both surplus and shortfall and steering towards project success with precision and efficiency. When you think of the most important elements of project planning, what comes to mind?

What is proof of concept (POC)? Writing guide with examples

A proof of concept (POC) demonstrates the feasibility of a proposed product, method, or idea. You must prove why your idea will work in the real world, so stakeholders and investors feel comfortable moving forward with the project. In this piece, we’ll explain how to write a POC and why this presentation is a beneficial part of product development. Before you spend time, money, and energy on a project, it makes sense to research whether your idea is worthwhile.

27 project plan templates to kickstart your best work

We all love it when a project runs smoothly. When there’s a clear plan, everyone knows what needs to get done, and they follow deadlines, projects tend to get completed on time and within budget. But all that doesn’t just happen—it takes a lot of careful planning. Project planning takes time, and tends to require a lot of manual, repetitive work—like defining project goals, creating timelines, drafting tasks, and distributing information to stakeholders and collaborators.

6 tactics for scaling resource management in enterprise orgs

Managing resources effectively is crucial for large enterprises to succeed. As organizations grow in size and complexity, work that was once manageable becomes a multifaceted challenge as more projects, cross-functional teams, and objectives enter the mix. Often, enterprise leaders find themselves tackling demands and shifting priorities to maintain efficient and effective resource management.

Project tracking 101: A guide to tracking projects effectively

When team members struggle to understand their individual responsibilities and deadlines, it can lead to confusion and delays. And without a clear view of a team’s project progress, it's difficult for managers to identify which tasks are lagging behind or need immediate attention. Project tracking addresses these issues by providing a transparent and real-time overview of all tasks, responsibilities, and due dates, ensuring everyone is aligned and on schedule.

5 project management phases to improve your team's workflow

There are five key project management phases that can help streamline your next project and enable your team with an organized plan. These phases include initiation, planning, execution, performance, and closure. Project management is often misunderstood. While many professionals view it as managing project timelines, there is so much more to the job. Thankfully, we’ve put together an easy guide to understanding the five project management phases. Why are the five phases so important to know?

5 innovative ways to encourage AI adoption in your org

In the evolving landscape of AI, sticking strictly to the traditional playbook is unlikely to yield the best results. Integrating new technology like AI into your business operations is often met with resistance. It's human nature—we're generally wary of change. To truly get your employees on board with AI, you'll need to think differently. Flipping the script on conventional wisdom could be the catalyst you need for change.

How to automate repetitive tasks in 5 steps

Your team is in a relentless, repetitive cycle: manually updating project statuses, sorting through work requests, and dealing with endless email threads—tasks that demand attention but add little to your organization’s strategic goals. This scenario is all too common in today’s enterprises, where manual tasks eat into valuable resources and sideline core objectives. That’s where automation comes in.

6 steps for operations leaders to build a better annual plan

An effective annual plan is critical to keep your teams, departments, and company together, working toward the same goals. As an operations leader, you oversee how your organization runs its business. By reviewing how your company performed in the past year, you and your operations teams can identify which strategies worked—and which fell short—to build an effective annual plan designed to maximize the impact of every department.

What is Asana?

Asana empowers organizations to work smarter. It's the only enterprise work management platform that connects company-wide goals, strategic initiatives, and the execution of work on a single platform. With Asana, individual contributors, managers, and executives at the world’s leading companies such as Amazon, Accenture, Roche, and T-Mobile to drive better business outcomes.

How 3 world-class teams streamline creative production at scale

From billboard ads to social media posts, high-quality creative assets are essential to make your brand stand out. But the larger your company, the harder it is to coordinate all the moving parts of creative production. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible. These three enterprise companies—Discovery Inc., Benefit Cosmetics, and Dr. Martens—have all cracked the code on large-scale creative production.

8 tips from best-in-class IT leaders on AI and role changes

Navigating the ever-changing technological landscape is a critical challenge for today's IT leaders—but it doesn’t have to be done alone. At The Work Innovation Summit, top IT executives from Slack, Zscaler, and Asana weighed in, discussing strategies for effectively navigating technological advancements, with a particular focus on AI.

How to Asana Find anything with Advanced Search 1

Search in Asana is as simple as typing into the search bar in the top bar. Refine search criteria and start creating reports with advanced search. You can search anything from completion date and assignee to custom fields and task creator (and more.) You’ll get a list of tasks, projects, and conversations that match your criteria.

Client management: Tips to attract and retain happy clients

Great client management will not only make it more enjoyable for your team to work with your clients, but it will also benefit your business in the long run. Besides making it easier to retain clients, happy clients also tend to give referrals and bring in new business. We’ll cover best practices for client relationship management, client management pitfalls you should look out for, as well as how you can use business integrations to keep your team on track and your clients happy.