Managing projects across teams both large and small isn’t easy. It can sometimes get complex and is often inefficient. That’s where collaborative task management firm Asana hopes to help out. It aims to make tracking work activities simpler, reducing the need for email and unnecessary meetings, or – as Asana calls it – all that “work about work.”
Asana was created in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and software engineer Justin Rosenstein after they saw a need to coordinate teams more effectively inside the social network’s operations. They soon realized that tech giants weren’t the only companies that could benefit from greater efficiency.
“It turns out that these difficulties tracking work are universal across organizations: the bigger your team, and the bigger your mission, the bigger your coordination problem,” Moskovitz and Rosenstein wrote in a blog post.
[ Further reading: How to pick the right collaboration tools ]
The application is now used by 25,000 paying customers, including companies from a number of industries, from Uber and Airbnb to Spotify, Bed Bath & Beyond and even NASA. That’s up from 13,000 in 2016.
How does Asana work?
At a basic level, the cloud-based software allows colleagues within an organization’s Asana workspace to track and manage the progress of projects. For example, workflows can be set up for HR teams to manage the onboarding process for new staff.
At a more granular level, “tasks” are created to monitor individual components of a wider project.
Teams of users can add tasks, assign them to team members, set due dates for completion, comment and share relevant documents. Notifications on the status of tasks – and looming deadlines – are sent to a user’s inbox.
