WLP310: Adopting New Collaboration Habits through Asana
In this episode we go into the detail of how to best use a collaboration tool like Asana - even though we concentrate on this particular tool, much of what we talk about is applicable to many other platforms that allow us to visualise our workflow.
Guest Bastien and Pilar go straight off script at the beginning of the conversation to remark on how LinkedIn and Slack have a feature for you to record your name so people know how to pronounce it.
Back to today’s topic: Asana is a collaboration tool, through which you can see what everyone is working on: who does what by when. Bastien is also a fan of using the tool for his own activities. Asana is more simple than other tools out there, but more scalable.
10 years ago, Bastien, then a web developer, had to choose a collaboration tool and was comparing Zoho and Asana - he went for the latter, and discovered the ability to create Templates. At the time, there wasn’t a way of sharing templates outside your Asana account, so he created Templana. Bastien learned how to use the tool thoroughly and soon found himself creating content around the tool, and landed a consultancy job, without even looking for it.
Working on Asana was a part-time activity for Bastien for the last 10 years, until 3 months ago, when he was approached by Asana to become an official partner. Helping clients adopt the tool is now his main job, through iDO.
Asana does have a strong community and it’s easy to find help (in fact, when Pilar was learning to use the tool to help a client, past guest of the show Morgan Legge added her to an Asana where she could find help). Bastien is the person to have posted the most in the Asana community. In fact, Bastien is a forum champion and there are only about 20 of them recognised as leaders in the community by Asana.
Bastien enjoys his time in the community because he gets to see use cases, and meet potential clients. It’s through that forum that he’s got clients - by helping people in the open for free.
Asana allows Bastien to organise his task list, pushing things to the future, manage different projects at the same time, while keeping everything “clean”. He feels at peace when everything is organised - and it’s allowed him to organise his life to be able to have two jobs, and grow his new business - including Templana, through which he helps coaches share templates, for example.
14.45MINS
There are different ways in which Bastien works with his clients. They might come to him because of tools he’s created previously that can improve the experience with Asana or they might come for help with using the tool better.
One example of where Bastien can help is by providing automations, for example, some people want all the Projects to go to the Portfolio, or all completed Projects to go to a different portfolio and this can be done through automation. (Asana is organised into Task / project/ portfolios and moving projects to different portfolios needs to be done manually.) In most cases, however, Bastien is able to address the client’s requests through existing features - sometimes coding something new is not possible, or too expensive.
The other way in which Bastien works with clients is through helping them optimise how they use Asana, without adding or discovering new functionality - often a quick screen share of their tool is enough to see what can be improved. This usually revolves around using the colours properly, using naming conditions, or organising the project around custom fields and sections.
Bastien thinks of Asana as a set of building blocks that you can organise in different ways to reach the same goal - it takes experience to see the arrangements that will be sustainable and those that will cause problems early on. By the way, Pilar also takes well to these kinds of tools because they enable her to find some structure to all the different parts of her work, and she wonders whether there’s a thinking style that allows you to see intuitively how to get the best out of these tools.
Adoption in a team usually starts with an individual who wants to introduce the tool into the team. Bastien and his colleagues try to empower them (teach the teacher) so that they can spread the word throughout the company and continue championing the tool once Bastien and his colleagues leave. Like every type of change, it needs a champion.
These tools don’t work by themselves - you need to train people to use it, and maintain them. We need to learn how to use them - and agree on how to use them - or else we get into the same situation as we are with email, where everyone uses it in different ways and there’s no agreement on how to use it!
Tools also need to be maintained - they are our online environment. You wouldn’t neglect an office space you use every day - however, online tools are often left to their own devices…
Bastien Siebman
24.40MINS
The biggest block that Bastien has seen to adoption of Asana, is leadership not using the tool, yet wanting their people to use it.
And yet, it can be very useful for senior leadership. Asana is built as a “pyramid of clarity”, so it’s about collaborating at a task level to reach the mission of the company. It won’t stick if the CEO is asking via email about what’s going on, rather than looking at what’s being communicated through Asana.
Bastien recently worked with a company of 50 employees, and senior leadership were able to see who was working on what, how busy they were, whether work needed to be shifted between people… and all this can be seen through the Portfolio and Workloads feature. So it can also be used as a strategic tool.
Bastien and his colleagues are now being challenged by those requests from clients who want to choose between tools, rather than get help on using their chosen one, Asana.
When asked which platform to go for, the first question Bastien asks a new client is “What was the event that prompted you to ask for help to choose a tool?” (Do listen out for the answer around 30.00mins, it’s very revealing and might well be the most common one…) Lack of clarity, drowning in emails, “everything’s a mess” are all common reasons too.
Other questions Bastien asks are: Why do you need the tool, how do you currently work, what other tools of you use, how are you structured in terms of teams, and who decided you need a tool? (This last one is important, to understand where in the organisation the need is coming from and the dynamics of who needs it.) So change management and adoption are now a key component of Bastien’s job.
Adoption often starts by giving them a demo of what the tool can do and the best things it can do. This is followed by setting up the processes properly, using colours and emojis to make it clear and clean. Then comes the training on features and best practices based on what they’ve seen in the past.
Reducing the feeling of overwhelm through the good use of notifications is also key - as well as reducing email. In the end, it’s about learning how to use the tools in general - and Bastien is doing this through teaching people to use Asana. (At the end of the day, you need the foundations of these collaboration platforms if you are to be a successful knowledge worker.)
One of the things you can do with Asana is replace long email chains. Bastien suggests doing this by replacing it with small tasks, of small scope, simple decisions taken by small groups of people… It might feel overwhelming at first because you might go from 10 emails to 50 tasks, but the tasks are small and easy to deal with - and you can delegate, delete etc.
Pilar takes this opportunity to ask Bastien his view on how to treat these tools. Pilar recommends that individuals check their collaboration platforms regularly to see whether there is anything they need to interact with, many people wait to be tagged. In Pilar’s view, this results in overtagging and too many notifications, which kind of defeats the purpose of replacing email with other tools.
Something Bastien does is teach people to “leave conversations” - which you can do in these tools by removing yourself from a task (and you can’t do in an email chain). You should choose those conversations you want to be notified about. Bastien has seen people struggle with this because they want to be involved in everything - and has had to resort on occasion to removing people from tasks.
Pilar has noticed that people are not used to doing this, in Trello, and so they linger in the cards even when their work in that task is done. Teams should discuss how to work together to this level of detail, to make sure we’re making the most out of these platforms and they’re make our life easier. Bastien recommends creating a recurring task to remind you to check what’s going on - rather than relying on notifications.
Finally, Bastien shares his new Asana-related project: generating a specific, unique image for different tasks, inspired by the task ID number. He’s not sure where to go with it, but it was an interesting technical challenge. Pilar thinks it can reinforce team identity and help us customise the collaboration platforms, which all look more or less the same regardless of who you’re using it with.
Furthermore, Bastien realised that each task has a story and the image he creates tells the story of the task. NFTs, here we come!
To connect with Bastien, you can find him on LinkedIn, and you can check out his website: ido-clarity.com/
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