What is Asana?

Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work. It is the work management platform they use to stay focused on the goals, projects, and daily tasks that grow their business.

PIKOHANA and Asana

PikoHANA uses Asana to organize tasks for our clients, keep track of clients’ cadence, and monitor the progress of the team.

Get to Know Asana

The Sidebar

Once you log in to Asana, you’ll find the sidebar which is the launching point for key actions. From the sidebar:

  • Check and respond to notifications in the Inbox
  • See all tasks assigned to you in My Tasks. In this section, you always know what needs to be done and when.
  • Access all the other features of Asana

Portfolios

The Portfolios store groups of projects. You can use them to see all the projects and status updates towards an initiative or objective in one place.

Teams

Teams are functional groups in an Organization that likely correspond to general teams at your company like marketing or sales. Mobilize Teams by creating Projects inside the different Teams.

Projects

Projects track all the actionable steps, information, and communications towards achieving a goal, initiative, or objective. This is where tasks are stored. Organize tasks inside a Project by breaking them down into sections.

Tasks

Tasks are stored in projects and make it clear who’s responsible for what task and the target completion date. Tasks store all the files, conversations, and instructions related to them, so information stays in the right place (and one place).

Collaborate with the team through tasks to get the workflows move smoothly in Asana.

  • Assign Tasks
  • Set task due dates
  • Add task details, instructions, and links
  • Add attachments
  • Add dependencies
  • Add followers – these are team members who may not be directly working on the task but as followers, they can stay up to date on the progress.
  • Indicate task updates and statuses
  • Send messages

Permissions and Access

Permissions and Access to tasks, projects and teams can always be customised. This way, only authorised team members may access the projects or tasks.

Make them Private

Private tasks:

  • To create a task that’s private only to you, create it in my Tasks and not to any project.
  • To share a private task, add a team member as a task follower. This will give them visibility to the task.

Private projects:

  • Making a project private will make it accessible only to the project members and task followers. To be a member of the project, one would have to be invited.
  • “Private to project members” means only project members can access and search the project’s tasks, conversations, and files.
  • “Private to me” means nobody can access or search for anything in the project except for you.
  • To change a project’s privacy settings, open the project and click in the upper right-hand corner.

Private teams:

  • “Membership by request” means anyone in your organization can see and search for the team, but must request to join and be accepted by a member to see its projects.
  • Hidden teams can only be seen and joined if you get invited by a requesting member.
  • To change these settings, click the gear icon next to the team’s name in the sidebar.

Giving Access to Team Members

  • Add team members as followers of the tasks – Adding someone as a task follower will provide them with access with just the one task. 
  • Add team members as project members – Adding someone as a project member will provide them with access to all tasks in the project.
  • Make the project public – Making the project public will provide access to all team members

Communicate with the Team through Asana

You need strong communication to move work forward as a team. With so many opportunities for miscommunication, Asana makes it simple by keeping your work, and the conversations about it, all in one place.

  • Use task comments to give updates, ask questions, or get feedback on specific pieces of work.
  • Use like (or any other similar symbols) to show that you have read something or to say thanks without having to type anything.
  • Use project conversations to rally your team around the project without a meeting or confusing email thread.
  • Use status updates in Asana to keep everyone on the same page, link to other work, and give shout outs to teammates.
  • Make team-wide announcements in Asana’s team pages and skip the giant email threads.