Asana – a simple and good project management, task-based tool

Mint had carried an article today “From a Facebook founder, a social network for work” [originally from NY Times]. It is always interesting to read about how one can improve your productivity. The article is about the task management tool ‘Asana’ but in view of valuations I guess everyone wants to attach the word ‘social network’ to their product.

Asana is a company created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Googler Justin Rosenstein. You can’t have more qualified people to work on such a tool. Rosenstein  is the man behind Facebook ‘Like’ and ‘fanpages’.

Asana is task-based software, a shared to-do list for the company. Work is assigned and completed by a potentially unending set of teams created on the fly. Asana is a Sanskrit word meaning “easeful posture.” Yoga practitioners think of it in terms of complex poses done effortlessly. “You should read a lot into the name,” Dustin Moskovitz said.

Just few days ago I was wanting to freeze on a project management tool. OpenProj is a bit complicated. Many times you just want to have a way to see what are the tasks one has to work on and move on with things. OpenProj, MS Project are way too complex, may be the User Interface makes you feel that way.

Few points,

• Tasks can be named and assigned across the company, then shut down or subdivided as the work progresses.
• People can rank, or have others rank, which of their jobs need attention soonest.
• Very neat UI design, you could feel it a little busy but will get use to it.
• Free and premium versions available
• You can build tools using their APIs to get additional reports.
• Asana can be used for CRM, bug tracking, applicant tracking (for HR dept), project management. Reasonably sure they will add a lot more features to Asana
• Asana’s competitors: ActiveCollab, Atlassian (Jira),  Basecamp, Rule.fm

Asana’s online video tutorials are simple and to the point.

The downside for free users –  not able to restrict the sharing of projects with certain members only. The entire company can view all related/unrelated projects. Not good. Decided not to go with Asana.