Asana: An intuitive collaboration tool for simpler traditional or agile projects

- [Narrator] Asana is work management software that also lets you plan, schedule, and manage projects and portfolios. Asana can support teams of any size, from solo workers to entire enterprises, including many Fortune 500 companies. It's free for individuals and small teams who need to manage their work. Paid subscriptions add more management features for tracking projects, portfolios, and interdepartmental goals. Project elements are organized into several levels. The top level is goals, from your organization's strategic goals to goals for a team and your personal goals. Portfolios represent related projects, for instance, those undertaken to achieve an organizational goal. Projects are the endeavors we all know and love. And finally, tasks and subtasks represent the work that goes into achieving a project's objectives. You can choose from four views. A simple tabular task list shown here, the board view, which is perfect for Agile and Kanban efforts. There's a calendar for seeing what's happening when, and finally, the timeline is like a Gantt chart. You can create tasks and subtasks to create a hierarchy of work. Also, tasks can have dependencies, and Asana provides all four types of dependencies. Plus, you can set start dates and due dates for tasks. You can mark tasks as milestones such as content complete shown here. You have to manually mark summary tasks and milestones as complete when their corresponding tasks are finished. There are several ways to see what people are working on. When you click someone's name, you can see their tasks, their projects, and who they work with. The team calendar shows when tasks occur and who's working on them. However, you can't easily see whether someone is over allocated and by how much. Collaboration in Asana is simple. You can message teammates or entire teams. In your profile settings, you can also set up notifications via email, browser, or Slack. The homepage in Asana is a customizable dashboard that starts with several panes, like My Tasks, Goals, and Status updates. The Reporting section stores other dashboards like My organization, and you can create your own. One of its most powerful features is building workflows with rules that help you save time by automating activities. Its biggest weakness is lacking built-in features for common project management activities like robust scheduling, resource management, and risk management. Founded in 2008 by two former Facebook employees, it boasts more than 100,000 organizations with paid subscriptions. Asana can help teams accomplish work and achieve goals. If you like what you see, head to asana.com to sign up for a free trial.