This is an adapted excerpt from my Intro to ASANA course, available on Virtual Gurus Academy; first published March 2021.
There was a time when project management would make me think of those little day planners you’d get in at the beginning of a new school year. We’d be taught to track our project and homework in those little books, and with a little discipline, that would be enough to stay on track.
Of course, life gets complicated. We grow up and build businesses, find clients, and generally learn how to be amazing at what we do. It also means that you hit the upper limit of what those little books – or TODO lists, or multi-tabbed spreadsheets – are capable of without turning your organizers to clutter.
A couple of years ago, I was under contract with a small company running a design-focused business. As tends to happen when starting out, this business chose a popular approach to track projects – Google Sheets and email. To be fair, this is a fair typical setup for a new venture being managed by only a few people. It’s easy to take the view that the overhead of learning additional tools is more expensive to one’s ever-diminishing capacity.
In this case, the company grew and took on more remote team members. A good problem to have, isn’t it? Increased team size also meant increased project complexity. Long email chains became more common, and would have to be tracked down for project details. Without centralized management, it became very difficult to unravel what different teams saw as the scope of a given task at any given time. When the remote staff gathered for an annual meeting to discuss plans for updating features over the next year, it became clear that the time had come to evolve their project tracking process.
This is where a solid piece of project management software comes in, but it’s also tough to get buy-in for yet another piece of technology that everyone has to learn. There are also a lot of competing software tools out there to choose from. In 2019, Zapier, a popular automation tool published the following on their blog: “If you’re working on a complex project with multiple internal and external collaborators, Asana is the clear winner. Its team management features centralize all information in one place, and advanced features like portfolios and workload allow you to accurately allocate resources.”
While Asana is most effective for solopreneurs interfacing with clients or small teams, it’s still one of many out there. The user interface is flexible enough to suit many different types of work projects without losing the core requirements that make it so popular.
For a detailed walkthrough of Asana’s project management features, check out my online course ‘Intro to ASANA’ at Virtual Gurus Academy, an online training portal for virtual assistants. Asana’s user guides documentation is an excellent source of information for those who want to go in-depth with a particular topic regarding the platform.
The course itself contains a walkthrough of the Asana interface and available templates. Students will set up a project, get familiar with available reporting features and some of the third-party integrations available. A high-level view of the collaborative team system is demonstrated environment. The course capstone has the student set up a launch campaign in order to see how this all works in practice.
I’ve also built ‘WordPress Theme Management (Intermediate Level)’, designed for virtual assistants who need to quickly get a handle on the setup and management of a WordPress theme. This course also includes Pocket Guide modules for HTML and CSS, so that a new user can leverage all of the options the WordPress theme interface makes available for customization.
To discuss analytics, quickstart web solutions, or potential collaborative work, visit the contact page and drop a line to Garden Nook Studio.