Asana: Online collaborative planning vs. Onsite planning
In the 21st century, majority the technological advancements and innovations have geared towards connecting people worldwide to increase productivity and efficiency in their lives. The productivity aspect is often geared towards companies or groups of people with a specific goal in mind. Asana is a free collaborative platform aimed towards managing tasks, production and projects within a team maximum of 15. For $9.99/month, you can get Asana premium (pre) where there is no team member limit in addition to many other features. This platform promises to increase efficiency and communication within a group and contains a long list of features to ensure this. Let’s discuss the pros and cons of this platform compared to traditional in-person collaborations.
Customizable
Asana allows you to track not only your own tasks but also your teammates. There is an option to rank these tasks by priority: high, medium and low (pre), and approximately how long these tasks will take. You are also able to turn smaller tasks or subtasks and turn them into larger projects when new ideas come up.
Communication
Asana allows constant and immediate communication between team members to allow each person to be up to date and easily accessible without having to physically be there. You are able to add tasks in the middle of the conversation to allow immediate action. In addition, you are able to follow and unfollow certain conversations or task updates, therefore preventing you from being flooded with unrelated conversations unlike the traditional “cc”ing.
Progress reports
With a large team, it can be difficult and tedious to constantly check up on people via email or scheduing a meeting in person to get a simple update on their progress. Asana has a feature that doesn’t even require you to contact these team members. This platform provides a status update as well as a visual progress update with the number of tasks to be completed and the tasks that have been completed.
Integrations
With people constantly working online and on their devices, they are storing their work in cloud storage services. Asana has integrated widely used services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, allowing immediate sharing of files and documents to the Asana platform for your teammates to access. Comparatively, in person, it would be more difficult to share and discuss documents to a specific group of people, whether or not they’re physically there.
Conclusion
Overall, Asana allows for organization of ideas, thoughts, conversations, documents, projects and so on, to increase productivity and work flow. It seems ideal for any team, whether it be a small start up or a large corporate company. However there are some cons to collaborative platforms. One being money. Although this is a free platform, if you’re a start up and want the full experience, sometimes the extra money isn’t worth it. Of course you have to spend money to make money, however, a simple scheduled meet up is, to a certain extent, free and arguably, nothing is more interactive than in-person discussions. Another one is timing. Although technology is supposed to make everything efficient, it is not always up to date. A unfinished task could be finished but people are busy and not everyone will be so quick to update their status as a soon as they are finished. It would be easier to simply ask in person to get an real-time update. In addition, any conversation online does not guarantee an immediate response. How many times have you had a back to back conversation online with quick replies seconds later? Hardly ever. If you want replies within seconds, a verbal conversation will give you that.
Collaborative platforms can provide many benefits to smooth out the work flow in a online medium. Traditional emailing, meetings, to do lists, etc has been implemented for so long and it gave us all the dominating companies we see today. Both have their pros and cons but who’s to say we can’t utilize both?
