Hi everyone, I'm Joe from Cobry, today I'm going to be talking to Ben Crow from Asana.
So, would you be able to provide me a little introduction to yourself? I'm Ben Crow, I lead our
partner program here in EMEA for Asana and Asana is a work management application which we'll talk
about in a bit more detail. Yeah, maybe I suppose the best place to start, as you say, is to introduce us
a bit to Asana, if you could. Asana is a tool that helps teams and organisations manage their work
and helps them coordinate their work better. So for example, a lot of companies will have an ERP
system like an Oracle or a SAP or a Sage or an Intuit or a Quickbooks and that manages all
their finances. Then they'll have a CRM system which is managing all their customer contacts
and forecasting and things like that. But, when it comes to actual work, they are using multiple
of applications to really figure out who's doing wha,t by when, who's responsible for
what, when things are due by, and actually what the the teams or the company is focusing on.
Asana kind of reduces the need for all of those multiple apps and gives you one work management
application. So, can you think of any sort of specific problems maybe that come to mind that
Asana can help solve for companies? So, a good example of a use case would be a marketing
team and we've got some brilliant examples of marketing teams using Asana. So let's just say
we've got a marketing team who is working for a company who are an online clothing company,
and that marketing team is responsible for effectively driving more traffic to the
website to generate more sales. So how do they do that? So they need to put some campaigns together
to perhaps promote the site, maybe there's some effort into developing the ease
of use of the site, they might do some different advertising, they might do some design. All these
different little projects and things that are being spun up and things they're agreeing on -
how do they coordinate that? So previously they would have been chasing between spreadsheets and
emails and meetings and stuff to figure out who's doing what, by when, reporting that out. With Asana,
you can actually do that in Asana. You can create a project for your brand campaign, a project for your
marketing development project for your advertising. All of that can live in portfolios of projects. So you
can report who's doing what within those projects. You then have tasks, those tasks can be assigned
to people and then you can chase up with comments and appreciations and likes when things get done.
So as a manager you can actually see an overall view of what's happening with your work and
the progress of those tasks and projects and portfolios. And actually, as a business leader,
you can look at the overall goal of your business. So, say we set a goal to increase
traffic to our site by 25 this year - did we get there? What's all the work that made that happen?
That's what Asana is - it's really a work management platform that gives you a lot more than just tasks
and project management. It gives you the ability to really look at your whole business holistically.
Personally at Cobry, obviously we use Asana and one of the things I always find is that it is
so much easier to organise your day and feel like you're on top of what you're doing if you actually
engage with Asana. I always tell a lot of people I don't use email anymore and they kind of go 'what
do you mean you don't need email?' And it's like well email is not actionable, I can't go into
an email and figure out who's owning what, by when and what the next step is and I can't just give a
little comment to say 'hey could you lean in here?' Email is very reactive and it's very kind of
'ping, ping, ping' and if you think about it now it's almost like sending a pigeon
out of the sky because you send a message you sit back and you wait for something to happen.
With Asana, it's much more interactive and much more live and real
whether you're using the phone app or or the online app. So I live in Asana, I'm not
jumping in and out of multiple apps to figure out what's going on. Those apps kind of feed Asana and asana
is really where everything happens, and if it's not in there it doesn't happen basically.
I even find them with our internal use of Asana, a lot of the time it will be maybe I'm
in Google Chat but I have the Asana bot set up, so I'll get my notification there and as soon
as I get that I'm straight back into Asana to start completing tasks again,
yeah it's great. And I suppose that's one of the other things about Asana is how sort of
customisable it is. Depending on how your organisation works, you can mould it
around how you operate. Yeah exactly, I like that you mention that because we see customers do some
really cool stuff with it on the basis it's very straightforward, very easy to use. But if you
want to get really clever we've just launched a new reporting called Universal Reporting which
is great. You can build your own dashboards and see what's happening across your work
but we have these custom fields as well, so actually anybody can be a developer
and you don't really need any skills. If you want to have specific tags or fields or drop downs or
dates or information or numbers or values against a particular task or within a project and then
view within your project that in a list format or a grid format or a date format or or even a
workload to see who's doing what by when; all of that's really customisable just with a couple of buttons.
So, you can design it the way you want to work it depending on your own business need
but it's not difficult. I've certainly noticed that even with setting up workflows
for organisations of different types by using templates as well. You really can just make it
work for an organisation of any industry really. If you're starting with Asana when you first log
in and create an account it then says to you 'do you want to create a project?' which effectively
is just a group of work that you're putting into one space. And you can have multiple projects and
then projects can belong to teams and groups and portfolios of projects and the structure is
pretty straightforward when you look at it. But these templates make it so easy
so it's like 'okay are you doing the marketing projects, are you doing an HR team, using an IT type
thing?' and it'll give you all these examples of project templates. And then you can even have a
task template, so for example if you want to send someone a task in the legal team or the
finance team that basically says 'I need you to look at this' and you can have predefined
fields and predefined custom drop downs and even automation that say 'if I select this on the task
or if this happens by that date, automatically root it here and automatically do that'
just to kind of keep that flow going which is awesome. So my my to-do list or my tasks
automatically juggles around depending on the day of the week. So things just filter to the
top without having to change it around, it's wonderful. So what would you say is
unique about Asana? Maybe something that differentiates it between other solutions?
What's really unique about Asana is something called multi-homing and that's a bit of a techy
term but what it really means is that you could have your own projects that you're running in
your team, I can have my products in my team, the legal team can be running in their work.
But I can create a task and I can copy in the legal team and actually add it to their project
as well as mine. So you can have one task living in multiple projects, so people can share and can
really collaborate and coordinate really well and that's quite unique to the way that our
data model works. Because our data model isn't structured it's really flexible, meaning
that actually more people can share and jump into stuff and make it more visible.
Do you have any success stories of people using Asana? So we've got quite a
an interesting mission at Asana, we have a really unique culture it's a really special place to work
but actually our business leaders and the teams really care about our customers and how we can
help reduce that workload. One of our customers is a brilliant example, since adopting Asana,
they've seen so much productivity increase and so much of reduction in people doing all
this work about work they've now gone down to a four-day week which is quite a bold statement.
They're still paying everyone the same but they find that they can do a lot more in four days.
But their staff retention, the vibe about the place, the productivity has gone through the roof because
they've adopted everything through Asana, and a four-day week, I mean that's just incredible. So,
do you have anything else you'd like to add just before we wrap things up? I guess the big
takeaway from me is just to remind people what work management is. So you know it is all
about moving away from those multiple apps to get stuff done and you've got this amazing tool
to manage your finance system you've got this amazing tool to manage your CRM with your customers
and forecasting. If you do that but actually you don't have anything to manage everything else
that happens in your business and especially with this remote work or hybrid work or office based
work because every company is going to be a bit different about how they approach going back to
the office, how do you coordinate? How do you bring all that together to make people be able to work
seamlessly together? So that's what work management is about, that's what Asana is about and yeah,
we'd love to help people get on board. Well there we have it folks, if that interviews left you
yearning for more knowledge about Asana or wanting to get started then head over to our website
cobry.co.uk