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Modern Marketing Tools Series – Part I: Collaboration Tool Asana

The steady growth and expansion of the MOBA Group within the last years keeps setting new challenges to a proper information flow within the company. In the marketing department as the primary communication hub all strings come together. This contains internal communication, the correspondence with 12 subsidiaries all over the world, and external relations with partners, providers, press, locals and customers. To improve this communication process, MOBA decided to make use of state-of-the-art collaboration technologies. This article is the beginning of a series of modern marketing tools at MOBA. They will give you a brief overview of the latest software for boosting teamwork. Let’s start with the online application Asana.

 

Asana – software for real teamwork

Collaboration is the next boost for productivity. Right in Marketing it is essential to always be up-to-date on all team topics. Beside the weekly meetings, this is an opportunity to quickly get an overview of all team tasks. 

All of us know this typical work day. You check your mail box with 43 new emails, 5 minutes later a colleague stops by, urgently needing something and your day is already full of meetings of different projects you are involved into. Asana is a handy tool that helps you keeping track of all the information you receive and the deriving tasks. Basically, it is a software that assists you in organizing your tasks. You can make to-do lists, keep track of your projects’ progress, and share tasks and documents with others. 

More detailed, every user has his or her own to-do list. Added to a team in a company, you can easily share tasks with each other, assign tasks to others or join a common project. When creating a task, you can add sub tasks, define a due date, add tags, attach documents, add a description, leave a comment, activate email notifications on updates of a task, mark them as favorites and much more. You can even organize your tasks in different sections. For instance, some may be due today, some tomorrow and some later. Also, you might want to split them up into subject areas, such as web, print, social media, etc. 

When creating projects, you can add members (even external members of your company, e.g. providers) and allow everyone to add tasks - corporate wide. According to the checked tasks, you will automatically see the progress of the project in the form of a line chart. You can further add conversations, files and deadlines in a common calendar. 

 

Why choose Asana?

For us, the tool is very intuitive. The logic is very much inspired by social media. This is not surprising since the founders and main developers come from Facebook. As such, you can add followers to tasks, tag tasks to search them easily and you can use Asana’s community for more information and support. If you have a question or problem, you can ask other users in the community for advice. This is alike our own philosophy. With this MOBA Community we make use of the same principle: the wisdom of the crowd. 

Furthermore, the integration possibilities with other applications perfectly fit our needs. Whether Chrome, MailChimp, Evernote, Dropbox or Google Calendar, we can combine the strengths of diverse tools with each other. The special platform for developers also leaves us the chance to individualize it according to our needs. Very important but not unique, though, was the mobile application. We are always on the go in the marketing department, whether on exhibitions, on the construction site or in external meetings. It is essential to always keep track on projects and tasks and to exchange information no matter where we are.

What is handy is the combination of a personal to-do list and a shared tasks list that your team members can follow. With this function, it’s possible to optimally split workload and support each other when needed. Also, it is clear what still needs to be done.  Asana is a quick and easy to use communication tool and organization assistant. You don’t need spatial proximity to work on a project together. Everyone involved can get access to the progress from anywhere, anytime. And this is just the basic version. Since Asana works very closely with Google, we can expect much more features and app integrations in the future. Also, the Premium version may boost teamwork in even more complex task and project structures if required.

Some companies using asana in their daily business are e.g. Facebook, Google, The New York Times, NASA, Harvard University, t3n.de or Adobe. 

 

Alternative collaboration tools

There are plenty of collaboration tools to choose from. By now, there is any kind of software for any requirement. Business solutions mainly are the following.

Trello

This tool started more in the private sector and is often used for one’s daily routine. Running errands, organizing family events, preparing for a vacation or planning small projects around the house, etc. are common purposes for this tool. Its user interface resembles a whiteboard, comparable to Pinterest. Much room for notes, pictures and color marks make it the perfect tool for creative brainstorming. 

Wunderlist

This application is a very neat option for simple lists and shared to-dos. It is easily includable into your personal life and your work sphere and offers similar functionalities as asana. However, it reminds of a simple to-do and does not come with much functionalities for the progress of a project. 

Todoist

This collaboration tool seems to be quite similar to Asana. However, it requires payment for most of the key features. Also, the people per project is limited to 5. This gets problematic when we work together with colleagues from abroad, different providers and multiple project members in-house. Also, the backup option is limited. 

 

Boosting teamwork in an international business

The tool is the perfect assistant for organizing tasks, planning projects, and keeping track of work progress within a team. Having an overview of ongoing tasks from anywhere provides us with more flexibility in our work. Also, notes and ideas can simply be added anytime.  The application really facilitates teamwork in this digital age, especially if teams exceed borders - even if it’s just the own office door.

Do you use any kind of collaboration tool yourself? If so, which one and what are your experiences?

Markus 01.09.2017 0 5312
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