Without mincing words, the project managers desire to be on top of the activities of their projects. However, it is always a herculean task to keep track of the projects and tasks of a complex project involving a big project team.
Also, another challenge confronting project managers is the task of managing the workloads of their projects effectively to achieve the desired results that meet the expectations of their customers.
No doubt, the inability to manage the project workloads will allow things to get messy and out of hands thereby causing them to miss out on the goals of their projects. Without this, they can never achieve optimization in their projects.
In their bid to achieve project optimization, project managers have embraced Asana Kanban in managing their projects. It simplifies the process of achieving ease in project management by helping you to keep track of the project activities.
According to Rahman Usta, the Kanban system increases the visibility of the project flow. Also, it enhances your ability to deliver swiftly by limiting work in progress. Also, it will aid you in detecting problems that could impede the flow of your project by analyzing them painstakingly.
Again, it ensures collaboration and effective communication among the project team. Also, it will help you in setting the priorities of your project to ensure that the important tasks are attended to properly.
The Kanban board feature of Asana Kanban makes it easy for sharing the project updates to the relevant stakeholders. Furthermore, it helps in organizing the resources of the project to achieve optimization.
Índice
Asana Kanban board and its alternatives: what they offer you
As a project manager, Asana Kanban will assist you in undertaking your project by breaking them into tasks and subtasks. Again, it will attach the deadlines to them to ensure that the team members are in tandem with what is expected of them.
Also, it will properly assign tasks to the members of the project team and you can track their activities until they finish them.
In Asana Kanban , you have a flexible tool that can effectively track different types of workflow in your projects. You can create a workspace for your projects with each project having its tasks within it that are assigned to the project team. With this, the members can add notes, tags, and attachments to their tasks to ensure proper management of the project.
Also, in Asana Kanban , you can conveniently follow up on the activities of your project via the updates into your inbox. This reduces the need for email as it will notify the team members with the status updates, comments, and project due dates.
Again, it can be integrated with other tools such as WordPress, Google Drive, and Dropbox to enhance the productivity of your team.
All about Kanban Board
- Kanban Tool and Methodology
- Kanban Board Example
- Trello Kanban
- Kanban Board Online
- Agile Project Management with Asana
- Kanban vs. Scrum
- Agile, Scrum and Kanban Software
Disadvantages of Asana Kanban
On the flip side, project managers often get confused while using Asana Kanban because of the features that are not needed by them. This allows projects to get complicated in the course of execution. Another disadvantage of Asana Kanban is that you cannot assign project tasks to more than one person on it. In some cases where you need to assign tasks to multiple people, then Asana is not suitable for such.
Again, some people believe that it lacks enterprise project management features such as the Gantt chart. This is the reason why some project managers make use of other Asana alternatives in the management of their projects.
Some of the Asana Alternatives
Sinnaps
As a tool, Sinnaps will help in categorizing the activities of your projects into different classes such as completed, late depending on your plan. It has board filters that allow you to filter the activities of your project to know the status of the tasks of your project.
Activities in the board are ordered vertically and according to its order of importance in the projects planning. Grouping them by impact and importance and prioritizing them by remaining time. This is why the top activities will be the most critical ones as they have less time to finish or they’ve been delayed the longer.
Also, you can use it to monitor the number of days left for an activity to be completed in a project. On Sinnaps, you can get to see the percentage of the finished subtasks.
Disadvantage of Sinnaps
It cannot be easily synchronized with other apps.
Wrike
Wrike is embedded with the Gantt chart that will provide a visual overview of the project activities to the members. Also, it has a good user interface that can be used with ease in managing your projects.
Disadvantages of Wrike
Wrike does not offer a free plan; hence it cannot be used by small business owners. Also, it will take some time before you can master its use because of its complex functionalities.
Trello
This is a tool that allows you to work collaboratively with your team members. Trello Kanban comes with boards, lists, and cards that will aid you in the organization and prioritization of your project tasks to achieve the desired level of productivity.
Disadvantages of Trello
One of the disadvantages of Trello is that it is not suitable for big enterprises. Again, it cannot be used to undertake complex projects because it lacks the advanced features required to do such.
In comparing Trello vs. Asana, Trello is a card-based project management tool suitable for projects requiring effective team collaboration. Asana is a tool with task-oriented features that offer better workflow functionality in project management.
Furthermore, Trello workflow is executed by dragging tasks from one column and dropping them to another to reveal the movement between the stages of the project. On its own, Asana similarly arranges tasks but it is more suitable for bigger projects.
Kanban examples vary based on the focus of the project work. These include both simple and complex works. The Kanban board example is the product development portfolio board. Here, the board assists in visualizing, managing, and keeping track of all essential aspects of the product development process. Another one is the strategic portfolio board. In this, you can keep track of the vital initiatives that bring outstanding value to your organization.
How to use a Kanban Board
The following steps are useful in using the Kanban board by the project team:
Step 1: Preparation of the Kanban board: here, you are required to divide the whiteboard into 3 columns. Then, label the first column ‘’To-Do’’, the second column ‘’Doing’’ and the third one ‘’Completed or Done’’. The first column is meant to capture items on the To-Do list, while the second column is meant to decide what the team works on. The third is meant for recording what you have finished.
Step 2: work using Kanban: here, you can add items or cards to the ‘’To-Do’’ column on the Kanban board with a marker. Then, when you are ready to work on it, drag the item from the ‘’To-Do’’ column to the ‘’Doing ‘’ column. Also, when it is completed, drag it to the ‘’Done’’ column. Then drag another task from To-Do to Doing until it is completed.
Step 3: Review your Kanban board: as you are dragging the tasks of your project from the left to the right of your board, you are required to prioritize your activities. Hence, reviewing your To-Do list will improve the flow of your project and help you in achieving the optimization of your resources.
