Palo Alto Networks reduces operating costs by 40% with Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Palo Alto Networks had 5+ work management systems for different groups, which led to overspending by +40%.

• Different processes and systems made it hard for teams to share and access data, slowing collaboration and preventing work from scaling at pace with growth.

• Across global teams, leaders couldn’t see how all work, resources, and business priorities fit together, making it difficult to spot risks and prioritize the most important initiatives.

Solution

• Leadership implemented a top-down consolidation into Asana, reducing the complexity, redundancy, and security risk of using multiple tools. 

• All work is managed in one place so teams can standardize and automate complex cross-functional work at scale. 

• A unified system gives leaders real-time access to information, which significantly speeds up decision-making and risk mitigation.

Outcomes

• 40% reduction in redundant operational costs

• Status reporting time decreased from hours to minutes

• R&D teams now hit 100% of deadlines set

• Smarter, faster decision-making and risk mitigation 

• Better resource forecasting for strategic planning

• Increased productivity and delivery speed

By unifying work in Asana, our entire organization can move quickly to adapt to the changing cybersecurity landscape. Work data and collaboration are in one place, so teams can self-serve information without wasting time on back-and-forth.”

Connecting teams to fuel innovation

Palo Alto Networks chose Asana for its flexibility, ease of adoption, and product roadmap— viewing Asana as a future-proof partner that would help them scale with powerful work data and groundbreaking AI capabilities. 

By centralizing work in Asana, the company broke down silos and gave teams instant access to information. Marketing can connect the dots with sales and easily share upcoming activities and materials, helping them get the most out of every lead. Product and R&D teams have one place to coordinate highly cross-functional launches and streamline work intake, so they can address customer needs and prioritize the right work for the business. Meanwhile, IT uses Asana as one source of truth to plan resourcing, coordinate across global teams, and ensure Palo Alto Networks has the infrastructure it needs to succeed.

Rolling out Asana across teams

Palo Alto Networks partnered with Asana’s professional services team on a tech implementation strategy that would quickly consolidate their organization onto Asana with minimal friction or disruption to their business. 

Palo Alto Networks started the rollout with marketing, migrating hundreds of marketers into the tool in just over two months. They then expanded to other teams including IT, operations, product, and R&D–deploying Asana to over 5,800 users in under 6 months. Asana’s professional services team worked hand-in-hand with Palo Alto Networks leadership to tailor recommendations to meet each team’s unique requirements so they can quickly maximize the impact of Asana to achieve a high ROI.

We all collaborated as a village with a strong partnership across Asana and Palo Alto Networks to get the migration done in the very tight timeline we had.”

Executing global campaigns at scale

The marketing team at Palo Alto Networks is responsible for driving awareness, demand, and customer engagement—helping the business grow revenue. The team is large and cross-functional, with over 600 employees in different offices and locations around the world. 

At that scale, it was hard for the marketing team to coordinate stakeholders and smoothly execute global campaigns. Now, Asana helps them work efficiently and stay aligned to business priorities.  

Standardized processes lead to faster campaign execution

• Campaign managers monitor all the initiatives they’re responsible for in one portfolio, which rolls up into an overarching view across global campaigns so leaders can see progress on goals and spot blockers quickly. 

• Every campaign requires coordination between multiple teams. Instead of wasting time on back-and-forth, campaign managers use forms to easily request assets and localization.

• Teams can see all their requests in one place, then kick off campaign work faster with over 80 standardized templates for different campaign workflows. Within those templates, pre-set rules instantly assign due dates and roles so marketers stay accountable and on track.

Marketing is complex, with many moving pieces. Asana lets us see everything in one place so global teams can work together with less friction and execute marketing programs at scale.”

Visibility improves marketing planning and budgeting

• Strategic planning is consolidated across teams into one overarching portfolio view. Leadership has visibility across all marketing priorities, budgets and resources in one place for ease of decision making. 

• Quarterly planning is standardized in a project template used by all teams. These projects connect to the leadership portfolio for a big picture view of all priorities. 

• Global custom fields standardize data collection and consistency in leadership reporting. Rules automate budget and projected pipeline tracking, streamlining performance forecasting. 

• With all marketing plans in one place, the team can seamlessly loop in sales and share upcoming activities using a Google Calendar integration. 

Streamlined work intake helps leaders plan workloads

• In the future, the regional marketing team plans to build work intake into their planning process. Instead of making separate requests, teams can check a box for support and automatically kick off work. 

• All follow-up actions and conversations would be captured on that request, so no context is lost and there’s no need for back-and-forth via email. 

• By capturing requests during planning, leaders can plan workloads ahead of time and make more accurate resourcing decisions.

I’m always asking ‘can we do this in Asana?’ Asana is flexible enough that we can build pretty much any workflow, and there’s so much more we could still do.”

Delivering cybersecurity solutions on time, every time

The product and R&D teams at Palo Alto Networks need to move quickly to maintain fast-paced innovation across their wide range of products. Cybersecurity challenges are always evolving, so the team has to be agile and work quickly to out-innovate cyber criminals and add new value for their customers.

This work is very cross-functional and complex. Asana helps the team streamline processes and get the visibility they need to move quickly on company priorities.

Centralized information simplifies complex launches

• Cross-functional teams now have one source of truth for complex product launches, reducing confusion and speeding up collaboration.

• With all work in Asana, it’s easier for product teams to hand off and track deliverables between functions like IT and New Product Integrations, ensuring new products are packaged and delivered correctly.

• Teams have visibility into top security priorities with an overarching “concept committee dashboard,” helping them balance product team priorities with company-wide ones.

One of my teams told me that after moving to Asana, they’ve been able to deliver 100% of their product projects. They’ve met all their commitments and delivered on all of their deadlines, which is quite impressive.”

Streamlined planning helps R&D work faster

• Leaders have a bird’s-eye view across R&D initiatives with portfolios and custom fields, helping them quickly prioritize work and remove blockers.

• To manage requests from across the business, the team uses forms to standardize intake into a project for prioritization. Automations quickly assign requests to the right person, while templates for different asset types help the team take action faster.

• R&D materials require frequent updates to keep pace with cybersecurity changes. All live assets are tracked in a project and built-in automations schedule refresh reminders, so nothing falls through the cracks.

• Thanks to streamlined goal tracking and automated updates, the team can share status reports in minutes—when it used to take them 6 hours.

Workload transparency helps leaders deliver on goals

• R&D works on many projects at once. Asana’s workload feature gives leaders visibility into the entire team’s bandwidth so they can adjust workloads across initiatives, leading to fewer delays.

• With more accurate work data and reporting, leaders can ensure the R&D team’s work is balanced across their whole portfolio and aligned to business priorities.

• This improved visibility also helps the team identify risks, get work back on track, and notify stakeholders ahead of time when projects are delayed.

We haven’t had a slipped project since we’ve used Asana. We’ve either been able to proactively adjust timelines 3-4 weeks in advance, or just get things done with clear deadlines and deliverables.”

Driving operational efficiency across a global business

The IT and operations teams at Palo Alto Networks are responsible for creating technology infrastructure that can scale with the business, as well as defining strategy and execution for the company’s top priorities. This work is essential to ensure Palo Alto Networks has the processes, platforms, and people it needs to achieve business goals. 

It’s also highly cross-functional. Asana helps IT and operations connect the dots between teams, so the entire business is set up for more centralized and efficient collaboration. 

Visibility helps leaders make better resourcing decisions—faster

• The IT team receives requests from across the business. They’re creating a workflow to streamline this process using an Asana form, helping them take action on requests faster. 

• Thanks to a custom integration with Jira, the team can automatically pull request data into Asana and waste less time switching between apps. 

• By synthesizing this data with portfolios and dashboards, project managers and leaders have the information they need to manage resources and take corrective actions quickly. 

With AI, it’s very important to have collaborative work management on a single platform. Someone can ask a question in Asana and AI has the information it needs to answer.”

Centralized work data streamlines technology rollouts

• The IT team uses Asana projects to coordinate Asana’s implementation across the company, ensuring every team has dedicated space to collaborate with IT on the rollout. 

• IT, operations, and cross-functional teams across the company have access to the same work data, no matter where they’re located. This helps teams self-serve information and collaborate more efficiently, with fewer back-and-forth messages.

Having the ability to be flexible with Asana was key. It’s always a very thin line between standardization and customization, and every company needs both.”

Conclusion

Data sharing and transparency are essential for a global company like Palo Alto Networks. In the future, the company plans to take advantage of AI features to drive efficiency in how teams use work data. They’re continuing their rollout across more teams, and introducing additional cross-functional workflows to drive efficiency and deliver best-in-class security solutions to their customers.