Project management has become one of the fundamental components of an organized and successful business. Whether you’re assigned to lead a new project or juggle multiple projects simultaneously, having the right project management tool is a game-changer.
Project management doesn’t just affect revenue and liability. It ensures unmatched client satisfaction and higher retention rates. It might seem like a daunting task. However, using the right time tracking software and project management tools can simplify both your work and home life.
From busy individuals to large enterprises, Asana has helped all types of users achieve their goals faster and more efficiently. If you consider the different ways project management can improve your results and simplify your processes, Asana provides a welcomed solution.
Note: The project management market is VERY crowded – see the image below! So although we are big fans of Asana, these concepts apply to other project management tools, as well. Just be aware that some of the plans and features vary slightly.
Let’s take a closer look at the different types of Asana users and explore the project management best practices that will allow you to get the most of your software and tools.
What Is Project Management?
Before diving into who uses Project Management tools, let’s first define “Project Management.”
While project management is not the entire operations of your company, it is a critical component. With any task in life, having a detailed plan can be incredibly helpful in achieving your goals.
Essentially, project management is a written or verbalized plan that details a series of steps necessary to bring you the results you need. Even simple at-home tasks can benefit from project management tools.
Nearly all projects you tackle at work and home have a timeline, goal, and budget. That’s where project management resources keep things on track. Let’s look at some quick examples:
- You want to do some spring cleaning in your house, and your garage is disorganized and overloaded. You haven’t gone through the contents of your garage in ages and are sure that much of your belongings can be donated or thrown away. When you open the garage door, you’re overwhelmed by how much stuff you find and don’t know where to start. Using the concept of project management, you can create a plan that allows you to divide the tasks and effectively sort through your garage. You can bring family members on board to simplify the process and meet the goals of your project quickly.
- Your web design and development team just received a new client who signed up for various services through your company. Before creating the new client’s digital marketing strategy, you need to design and develop a responsive website. You will work as the project manager who collaborates with the client and conveys their information to the designers. Project management allows you to identify each step necessary to reach your client’s goal. You can collaborate with your team to help them understand the project’s scope, stay on task, and meet the client’s deadline.
Regardless of whether you are working on a personal or professional project, most projects have the same four elements:
- Scope: This identifies the project’s size, goals, and requirements.
- Resources: These are the people, equipment, and materials needed to complete the project.
- Time: This addresses how much time the project should take overall. More importantly, it breaks down each element of the project into tasks and identifies how long each task should take to keep your project on track with your deadline.
- Money: This includes costs, contingencies, and profits.
Successful project management takes practice but undoubtedly gets easier with time. With significant advances in technology, you now have access to project management tools and resources that make managing tasks easier than ever.
Asana is an effective project management tool that organizes your work so you can stay on track. You can get connected with your team in one shared space to assign tasks, manage deadlines, and collaborate more effectively.
Let’s take a closer look at the typical user personas who take advantage of Asana’s benefits.
3 Types of Asana Users
As Asana continues to gain popularity in the virtual workspace, three common types of user personas take advantage of the benefits of this all-in-one platform.
1. Individuals
Whether you want to keep track of your household to-do list or organize your daily workflow, Asana offers several advantages for personal use. Creating an account is free and allows individual users to create simple boards and lists that track their project goals and daily tasks.
Individual users rely on Asana for everything from making to-do lists to assigning family members chores and sending shopping lists. It’s an upgrade from traditional pen and paper lists that easily get lost in the hustle and bustle of life.
Since most individual users don’t need the countless integrations advanced packages offer, Asana’s free plan is typically a great fit. It’s an excellent option for those just getting started with project management.
You can manage unlimited tasks and personal to-dos and collaborate with up to fifteen teammates. With the significant shift to work-from-home, many individual users rely on Asana to track their daily work tasks.
2. Teams and Projects
Almost every successful business uses one or more project management tools to handle their tasks, track time, and manage daily work. Countless companies have shown that using project management tools increases performance and productivity.
Asana provides business users with the solution they need to keep things organized, delegate tasks, and stay on schedule. Team and project users love how Asana allows them to keep close track of their projects, communicate with clients and vendors (without unnecessary meetings!), and improve project collaboration.
With Asana’s premium plan, your team can create project timelines and break off into private groups and projects. You can use Asana reporting tools to track employee progress and take advantage of Asana’s convenient time tracking app integrations for hourly contracts.
Team and project users come together on one platform to collaborate on every aspect of a specific project. For example, marketing teams can build an entire marketing campaign through Asana. This doesn’t just help keep things on track, but it also saves time by:
- Cutting down on meetings
- Creating a convenient, central location to check the status of each task
- Streamlining conversations
- Reducing the need to check in on the status of a specific task
Team and project users also benefit from a multitude of integration options. This adds to project collaboration by integrating other platforms your team uses daily. For example, marketing teams can integrate apps like Canva, Figma, MailChimp, HubSpot, and more.
3. Enterprises
For large corporate users that need advanced security, control, and support, Asana offers business and enterprise solutions. The unique versatility of the platform meets the needs of some of the largest organizations.
Providing much more than time tracking, Asana offers enterprise users a work productivity tool that offers complete collaboration for more significant and complex work teams.
Some of the most well-known enterprises take advantage of the benefits of Asana’s business and enterprise-level solutions. We can see tons of household names on Asana’s site:
While the main focus of Asana enterprise plans is to provide advanced support and control, the tool continues to invest in enabling enterprises. Users can set goals, customize forms, and use more advanced tools for reporting with Asana. Portfolios allow you to get a sense of status across cross-functional teams.
Your business can manage multiple teams in one convenient space to get dozens of projects done quickly and effectively.
For example, your product, engineering, and marketing teams can collaborate in one dedicated workspace to ensure your new product release goes off without a hitch!
Since enterprise users are more likely to use integrations, the Asana Business and Enterprise Plans even allow users to add advanced integrations like Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, and Power BI, to name a few.
With over 200 apps easily integrated into your workspace, you can see the bigger picture and tie everything together to work smarter. Now your upper management can oversee thousands of tasks delivered by dozens of users.
Customers interested in further analysis of users can take advantage of Velocity. We are a 3rd party application explicitly built for advanced reporting and detailed dashboards using Asana data.
We hope this provided a helpful breakdown of the types of project management users and use cases. As you can see, the flexibility of Project Management platforms allows for individuals and enterprises to create custom solutions that make their lives simpler and more manageable.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog series, where we dive into some of the more unconventional use cases that can be created with Project Management tools.
As always – we’re here to help: [email protected]