In this episode, we focus on the benefits of project management tools like Asana.
We are Christina and Peter Pilarski founders and leaders of CIPR Communications.
Why Asana?
Asana or any similar project management web-based tool is an absolute must for any agency in the digital marketing space. For organizations, especially large ones, organization and standardization are critically important and Asana is a tool that can help you accomplish this.
In our space, we have many clients, many projects, and many deliverables that we have to stay on top of, and we try to be as transparent as possible to clients; Asana allows you to do this.
The beauty of Asana is that you can have clients there, participating in projects, and involved in discussions. The key to using project management tools is to really invest yourself in it, use it to your advantage and make the most of the benefits that it has to offer.
Bye-bye sticky notes!
Christina is naturally very organized and always has been. Back in the day, she used sticky notes to organize her day, and this worked until life became busy – really busy as we started to work together, and grow our family.
Eventually, we started to lose touch with what each other was doing. So, we decided to start using a basic spreadsheet to keep track of what we were doing, and we are the first to admit it didn’t work so well. We were just starting to learn how to communicate as colleagues rather than as husband and wife– which is not an easy feat when a couple goes into business for the first time together and have to learn how to be organized and how to communicate better. If we could describe Asana in simple terms, it would be that Asana helps you to organize your thinking and organize your thoughts.
Asana has helped us with standardization and provides you with a standard framework to put everything together and organize information easily. It allows you to create templates while also being able to customize it and it helps to create consistency.
For us, Asana is extremely useful for us to keep on top of projects when there are so many different people who are interacting with the same projects at the same time. This can really be of benefit for large corporations to help manage their internal organization as many companies struggle with this.
Project management tools like Asana allowed us to grow. We started to understand capacity more and were able to balance our time between multiple tasks better.
Get interactive
And then we had an Aha! Moment and realized that we needed to add our clients to Asana. It helps you get insight into a client’s culture when you see them react to a tool. It provides clients with the choice to communicate with us collaboratively. Logging into a project management system and being able to see the communication between us and our clients makes the relationship between us and our clients much more fruitful.
Asana is our tool but we realize it is not necessarily a tool that is a good fit for all our clients so we also communicate using email etc. as their preference is also important to us. The most important thing we’ve done so far with Asana is to add weekly updates and keep people in the loop which is extremely important to do.
A good tip when looking for a marketing consultant agency is to ask how they keep themselves organized. It helps to know that you have someone who is organized for you especially if you’re not naturally organized yourself from a marketing communications perspective.
Grow your business
People often hire agencies and don’t actually know what it is they are doing for them, which sounds pretty incredulous to us. The right project management tool will include your clients in the process and is important to growing your business especially in a marketing, communications, and public relations agency.
