Asana & Kanban Boards
I use Asana for just about everything I do. It’s simple to use, but still powerful/flexible. At its heart it’s a task/project management tool, but I use it for other things as well.:
Capture notes from meetings or research
Brainstorm ideas
Store Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) as project templates
Track customer projects
But for actually getting work done, I subscribe to the Kanban way of life. It’s a great way to visualize what needs to get done (or isn’t getting done), but more importantly help you break off a manageable chunk to get things DONE.
Asana has some guides, and you can read up on the principles behind Kanban here. When setting up your own boards spend some time coming up with what each section should be. Keep it simple, but try to match it to whatever your workflow is.
Example Kanban Board
Just to illustrate let’s create a Project called ‘Website change board’ with sections as follows:
As you can see we’ve got a lot of New requests that have come in, and we’ve only scoped out 2 tasks. Nothing has been implemented yet. This might be an indication of a resource problem, or maybe it’s just that it’s a new team propped up to refresh the website. Either way we’ve got a good visual indication of what’s going on, and it will help facilitate discussion in the next Zoom call.
So, we met and IT convinced Marketing that we need to upgrade the webserver before pushing through any new changes (I can dream right? :-), but we also scoped out the work for some other tasks and prioritized them.
We’ll take care of ‘Remove expiring marketing campaign from website’ right after the upgrade
Tom thinks the YouTube embedding will be a quick change
The new logo isn’t ready just yet, so we’ll push that to ‘On Hold’ until we hear back from the Design team.
After the upgrade Sarah will remove the expired campaign.
So our board looks like this now:
Tom got the website upgraded, and let Sarah know she can make her change:
Task complete! Progress!
We were able to visualize the work that needed to get done and facilitated some meaningful Zoom calls to unblock the project. It’s obviously harder to do that in practice, but spending even the bare minimum time configuring a project management tool can really help your business. I like to think of it as applying method to the madness not bogging yourself down in procedures. These agile tools are so easy to use now, and I kind of feel guilty that I’m just on the free Asana basic plan.
Note that if you have a Microsoft 365 plan you can use Microsoft Planner to do much of the same things built right into your Teams client. Asana might be more flexible now, but Microsoft is adding new features frequently.
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