ILRI Comms project insight 2014: Asana

Ben Hack

CKM Team Meeting

Addis Ababa, 2-4 February 2015

About Asana

1. Importance: CKM team needs to • coordinate a large number of ongoing projects with a

• complex division of labor across two main locations and with

• an increasing number of embedded communication staff in regional office.

2. Asana is a Social Task Management Platform

3. We want to test Asana to see if it is a good fit for CKM

Asana

Not quite Yammer

Social Task Management

Goals of the pilot test

• Share tasks and coordinate projects and teams.

• Create awareness of who is currently working on what by offering an at-a-glance overview of ongoing work and an activity stream that displays everything happening in a project.

• Keep the team effective by limiting work in progress: empower individuals to transparently renegotiate backlogs when priorities change.

• Reduce ‘work about work’: time spent on email, in meetings and on coordination.

Activities: Timeline

June July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb

Requirements

Analysis

Launch

Test period

Evaluation

Go/ no-go decision

Evaluation: Teams and pilot testers

Teams Members Externals

Publish & Curate 6

Engage & Collaborate 5

Awareness & Advocacy 1

CG Space 7

ILRI40 5

Salesforce CRM 5 2

POD Micorsite 9

Gender 8 2

MEL 12 2

Total Users 49 6

Evaluation: Usage

Teams

• E&C: Most consistent use, team meetings

• A&A, P&C: mainly personal to-do lists

• ILRI40 defaulted back to email

• CG Space on and off

• Gender & MEL

Projects

• POD microsite and Salesforce

Evaluation: Survey results

Dimension Asana…Average

(1-5)

(strongly)

agree

Business value saves time on the job. 3.5 47%

Situation

awareness

communicates progress on task to

colleagues and supervisors.4.4 79%

helps me stay aware of my team

members' activities.4 63%

Collaboration

support

helps me collaborate with others at

ILRI.3.3 42%

helps me collaborate with others

outside ILRI.2.2 16%

Social connectionshelps create a community around a

topic of interest.3.3 32%

helps me expand my social network. 2.8 32%

Usability Is easy to use. 3.4 47%

I want to keep using Asana! 3.8 58%

What people struggled with

• Cannot attach files to projects, only tasks• Unified inbox is missing• Could not connect to Macbook• Working with consultants, most communication is on email so

we had to re write everything in Asana.• A quick help button to guide will be useful• Some functionalities hidden or immature• Login in, speed• Ease of use, slight learning curve.• Yet another platform…• Difficult to structure• Difficult to integrate with other tools

What we learned: No surprises

1. Support is keySimple but powerful tools present challenges even to experienced users and early adopter-types.Transparency is not the same as productivityNot everyone is a ‘list-maker’

2. Asana works where there is a need Working with external consultantsEarly adopters, working out loud

3. Platform fatigue is realIntegration may be more important than ease of use.Some overlap / redundancy with Yammer.

Recommendations

1. Extend trial to all of CKM for duration of 2015

2. Set up Asana user support group to unlock full potential

3. Make final decision dependent on Office 365 rollout

The presentation has a Creative Commons licence. You are free to re-use or distribute this work, provided credit is given to ILRI.

better lives through livestock

ilri.org