Introduction to Asana for Project Management

hello my name is Paul Meiners and welcome back to another one of my Asana training videos in this video I want to give you an introduction to how you can get started with Asana for basic project management I'm going to walk through how to create a project and I'm going to show you some of the features that you can use to help you move your project forward more efficiently this video is intended more for beginners who haven't spent too much time with Asana so I won't be covering all the features of Asana in this video but if you do want to learn more then check out the other videos on my channel if you have any questions after this video please feel free to leave me a comment below and if you would like one-on-one help with setting up or optimizing your Asana account or maybe you want to improve the adoption of Asana within your team then click the link in the description below to learn more about my Asana Consulting options to create my new project in Asana I can either click the create button up here and choose to create a new project or I can click the plus button in the project section of my sidebar you can start your project using a template or by importing from a spreadsheet but for this demo I'm just going to start with a blank project so I can talk through the steps a little bit more I'm going to give my project a name so let's pretend I'm launching a new product so I'll just call this new product launch but obviously I would be more specific with the project I can then choose what team I want to put the project in and if I make this project public everyone in this team will be able to see the project even if they're not an active project member so I can put it in the team and I can leave it public if I want my team to have access or I can choose to make the project private if I only want certain individuals to be able to access this project so I'll I'll keep it private for now one of the great things about Asana is it supports different types of project view so we have as you can see here the traditional list view where I can see my tasks and I can see various custom fields and assignees and dates there's also a board layout which is sort of this kanban style of working where you can move tasks through various stages this is great for projects that follow a particular workflow there's a timeline view if you're a very visual person if you want to see when tasks start and finish if you want to see the dependencies of tasks the timeline view is great and I find that this view works really well especially for projects where you're working backwards from a important deadline like an event or or in this case maybe a new product launch and then finally there is the monthly calendar view where you can see tasks due on particular days doesn't really matter what you choose because you can change the view later if you're not sure I just recommend starting with the list I'm going to start adding um tasks to my project and so we're going to go to my project now before I start inputting any tasks I'm actually going to go to the overview section first and on this page I can write a bit of a summary of the project and insert some key resources and things so I can put in here maybe project description and goals we'll use this project to plan the launch of our new product the goal is to generate 100K in sales in the first year something like that so I can just use this area to explain a little bit more about what the project is about I can also add different project members here so I might choose to add let's say Warwick on my team and I can choose what kind of access and permission I want to give him and so because this project is private only Warwick and I can see this project and the tasks in the project right now the other members of my team so this project is in the pool miners team here other members of this team cannot see this project right now down here we can choose to link this project to various goals I'm not going to be talking about that in this video but I do have very detailed training on how to use goals in my master Asana program click the link in the description to learn more about that but I can create add Key Resources down here so I can either create a more detailed project brief if I want to expand on the description and write more details of what the project is about I can also add links and files in here if there are various documents that support this project that my team need access to once I'm happy with the details on the overview page I'm going to go back to my list View and the first thing I recommend doing is creating some sections which we will use to organize the tasks into different stages or phases and how you use sections will vary depending on the type of project that you are creating so for something like this new product launch I might say I might have sections for phases where I say phase one is about planning I might have another section for phase two production and then I might do one more section for phase three launch so sections I just used to organize the tasks into different areas once I have my sections ready to go I would then create some Milestones Milestones are sort of like tasks but they are the more significant important tasks think of them as like the deliverables or major due dates within a project so I'm going to have a milestone let's put this into the planning section so we might have a milestone for product specifications uh defined that would be a major Milestone is is working out the specs of the product I might have a couple of um a couple of Milestones down here in production for production testing complete I might do another one here for a production run started and then production run complete and actually I set these up as tasks but if I right click whoops if I right click I can Mark as Milestone so I can easily convert them to Milestones like this and then let's let's do one more in the launch let's just say you know product launch day okay so those are my Milestones those are the major deadlines or significant uh kind of deliverables in the project and you'll see those appearing on your overview page down in the Milestones section now I can actually go through the process of creating tasks for sort of the smaller steps that we need to do to actually complete these various phases and stages of work so in this planning section I might have tasks for um product law product design meeting that might be a task um design product packaging maybe I'll do another one here for um product marketing plan complete and there we go I've added a couple more down here in the launch phase for sending an email to our newsletter and posting on social media I can also if I click one of these line items I can open the task here and I could add subtasks if I want to further break down a task into smaller steps so I might say Facebook and Instagram uh you know posting on social media I want to make sure we post on various platforms now arguably the most important bits of information about a task are what is the task about but also who's doing it and when is it due because if we don't assign the task if we don't have a date it's probably not going to get done so if I click on a task like this one here at the top I can choose and assignee and you can only assign a task to one person at a time this is by Design because uh Sana kind of believed that if you can assign a task to more than one person each person is going to feel less accountable like oh the other person will do it and so there's less ownership of that task so Asana does force you to pick you know somebody on the team to really own that task and so I can either click here in the column or I can click in the task details here to assign this to various people on my team I can also put due dates on my tasks that could either be a singular due date if I just need the tasks to be completed before a specific day or in this case here design product packaging this is something that might take a few days or a few weeks so I could actually apply a date range to my task like this and so now I've got a start and end date and so I might continue going through my project now and setting up assignees and dates for everything so my Project's coming together pretty nicely now I've planned my work into different phases I've identified the major Milestones of the project and the tasks that we need to complete and I've identified who is doing what and when different tasks need to be completed you can go into further detail with your tasks in the description you can see I've put some notes so that when I click on this task and I view this or if this is actually you know assigned to somebody on my team and they look at the task they can see the notes they can um they've got everything they need in one place I can also attach documents from my computer or from Google Drive to this task so again when Warwick in this case sits down to work on the task he's got the task details in front of him all the attachments notes and we can actually have conversations inside of Asana here as well so again he really has everything in one place in order to make progress on this particular task now just to show you with a couple of other views that we have access to so this is the list view that I mentioned before if I check if I go to my board layout you can see my sections just turn into columns and I can see my tasks vertically here I personally really like the timeline view and if I zoom out a little bit here I can see very visually when different tasks start and finish I can see my Milestones with these green lines down the screen here and a feature that I really like on the timeline is that I can actually link um tasks and create what are called dependencies so if I hover on my mouse on this task and grab this little blue dot I can drag this onto a task and you see this little arrow here this is this has created what's called a dependency so now this is telling me that I can't start on this task because it is blocked by this previous task that Warwick needs to do and Warwick can see that his task is blocking my task so it really helps to establish you know an important sequence of uh in which tasks need to be completed so that we can move the work forwards and then if there's a delay to this task Asana can automatically shift mine back accordingly as well so that's the timeline view and then we have the calendar view as well where I can see sort of a monthly view when and when different tasks are due now I'm not going to get into this in this video but I do just want to point out that Asana gives you some nice customization options so under my customize menu here I can add additional fields to my project if I want to track my time or set the status or priority of a task I can I can add custom Fields I can also create automation rules if I want updates to happen to tasks when my complete or update a task have that notify certain people I can use those automation rules I can connect various apps like Google and Microsoft apps Zoom slack and so on to help USANA talk more effectively with my my other tools I can create forms that link into Asana where I can fill in a form to create new tasks in this project and you can create task templates for repetitive tasks that you need to do again and again so slightly more advanced features I won't get to in this video but again click the link in the description below if you do want to get access to my more detailed video training now as we start working on the project it's important to keep tasks and the project itself as up-to-date as possible because if we're not updating Asana then it's really not that useful as a tool so on a daily basis you should be updating your tasks you could be posting comments and questions down here in the comments so you can communicate with members of the team so I can I can type down here at Warwick can you attend this meeting and so we can we to post conversations in here I can collaborate with my team and get the input that I need to make progress on various tasks of course when the work is done it's important to Mark the task as complete either up here or by ticking this little circle and that's going to notify the collaborators on the task that that bit of work is now done and so we clearly know where we're at in the project it's also important to keep your project plan up to date so if you feel like you're not going to be able to hit certain deadlines I recommend updating the due date on tasks so that we have a new Target deadline that we can work towards and as you progress through the project you can post a status update on the overview page you can set the status of the entire project as either on track which generally implies to the project is going well and you're you're meeting your deadlines you can change the status of the project to at risk if you're maybe falling behind a little bit or off track if you're really behind and the project needs uh you know to be seriously looked at so I can set my status up here and I can post a more of a qualitative update I can write a summary about how the project is going I can talk about what we've accomplished recently recently what's blocked what we're working on next and Asana does give me some useful highlights that I can bring in here if I want to report on what we've recently accomplished or what we still have left to work on and so when I post this project update this is going to get shared with the members of the project so everyone is kept in the loop about how the project is going so there we go that is a little look at how to get started with Asana for project management like I said we really have just scratched the surface in this video if you would like to learn more about how to get more out of Asana and some of the more advanced features that we didn't cover like the customization options rules goals portfolios then check out my other videos or click the link in the description below to learn more about my Asana Consulting options thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: MinorCo

Views: 37,456

Keywords: Introduction to Asana for Project Management, asana project management, how to use asana for project management, asana tutorial for beginners, asana project management tutorial, how to use asana, project management, how to asana, project management software, asana project management review, how to use asana for beginners, asana tutorial, asana project management demo, asana, asana demo, asana project management app, how to use asana project management

Id: yyn7FfHKO90

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023