TheSoul Publishing produces engaging media for global fans with Asana

Highlights

Challenge

• TheStory Publishing relied on a combination of spreadsheets and their existing task management system, but it couldn’t scale with them, causing issues across the company.

• Many meetings were necessary for teams to align and understand what everyone was working on.

• It was difficult to see status, deadlines, and how work was connected, creating departmental silos.

Solution

• Today, Asana is TheSoul Publishing’s official work management platform, enabling departments like production, finance, sales, legal, IT, HR, and PR to collaborate seamlessly.

• Processes and programs are centralized so that everyone can see everything, which reinforces the company’s value of radical transparency.

Outcome

• Less work about work: Saved significant time that would have otherwise been spent coordinating work—by automating tasks, centralizing communication, and standardizing processes

• Accelerated execution: Accelerated execution by starting thousands of projects from Asana templates

• Radical Transparency: Achieved radical transparency across departments by making plans, projects, and status visible

Asana lets us bring project management to the entire organization without the need for much education, because the platform is so easy to use. Junior specialists work perfectly in Asana, and executives do the same.”

How Asana helps TheSoul Publishing work smarter

Centralized work and teams

TheSoul Publishing manages extremely complex workflows and staggering production numbers. To continue their output and be able to scale, they turned to Asana for a more organized, streamlined, and effective way to work. 

Now, thanks to increased visibility and more efficient processes, TheSoul Publishing is able to execute faster than ever with Asana. 

Simplifying complex workflows with organization and structure

In the content production department,each content piece takes days or months to produce and can be translated into as many as 19 languages.

Anastasiia Vinogradova is Executive Producer for the La La Life brand, a collection of three YouTube channels that produces comedic videos with musical elements. Organizing projects in Asana helps eliminate the need for extra communication and status meetings. 

Organizing work for increased visibility

• Each video corresponds to one Asana project—or more, depending on how many languages it’s translated into, how many media types are involved, and how many social media channels it will be distributed on.

• All projects are organized into an Asana portfolio so that Anastasiia has a high-level view of where each video stands in the production cycle. 

• She uses the Portfolio Timeline to see when content will be ready to go live, and she uses Dashboards for reporting. 

Streamlining production with custom templates

• Production kicks off each new content project by duplicating an Asana template, which contains all the video creation steps organized into sections—such as finding an idea, writing the script, ordering music or animation, shooting, and all the post-production stages. 

• There can be hundreds of tasks for one video, and they involve specialist teams, like animation and sound design.

When we open the project, we can understand what was done already and what is yet to be done. We don't need any additional communication about it.”

Automations kick start a more efficient and effective onboarding process

Aleksandra Sulimko, Chief Human Resources Officer, runs a global HR and internal communications department to oversee the entire employee lifecycle, beginning with onboarding new hires. And that’s no small feat given that, on average, TheSoul Publishing hires 100 new people per month. 

TheSoul Publishing has built an automated onboarding process by integrating Asana and their Human Resources Management System (HRMS). This allows the HR team to not only keep up but to delight newcomers and educate them about everything in the company. “Learn by doing,” Aleksandra says. “Asana is perfect for onboarding, and it helps our team effectively replicate our work.”

Powerful integrations to automate employee onboarding

• To kick off the onboarding process, a recruiter simply enters a candidate’s name and start date into their HR system, BambooHR, which is integrated with Asana via the API. 

• This sets off a fully automated onboarding sequence in an Asana project, starting with pre-boarding—the tasks that carry a new hire to their first day, like receiving a computer and getting a parking card. 

• On the new hire’s first day, they’re assigned an automatically generated Asana project that’s tailored to their specific department, which guides them through steps to learn about company culture, sign employment documents, and practice using company tools.

Forms centralize request intake to reduce busywork

• The HR department uses a set of Asan

  a Forms to help employees make internal HR requests. 

• There’s a form for every need, including requests for business trips, promotions, training, and relocations. 

• Asana Rules automatically triage submissions and turn them into Asana tasks, where HR can follow up with the employee so it’s all done in one place. 

• Forms are used for all operational departments in the company, and TheSoul Publishing employees submit nearly 7,000 forms per month.

Asana upleveled project management at the organization, showing us how to make our workloads more transparent. This is the most beneficial part for us as transparency is a core principle at the company.”

Smoother IT processes for a visibility boost

In 2020, IT’s initiative to standardize quarterly planning went awry: their previous task management system didn’t support planning at their size and scale. Now, all IT processes are managed in Asana, creating more transparency and a stronger connection between IT and business activities. 

Simplifying complex IT projects

• Asana helps the IT department successfully navigate complex projects, like their proprietary content management platform, thanks to better prioritization, collaboration, and clear deadlines. 

• They’ve achieved their initial goal of standardizing quarterly planning across the company, and each department at TheSoul Publishing now has a dedicated portfolio in Asana that captures their projects and plans.

Boosting project completion (with complete visibility)

• IT uses Asana data to report on the percent of projects completed each quarter, which makes it easy to understand a team’s ability to execute and to hold project owners accountable. 

• Since implementing Asana, this project execution metric has significantly improved—in IT, for example, project completion rose up to 100%.

With the clarity created by Asana, you can easily highlight who’s responsible for a task and involve team members to get feedback. The milestones and deadlines encourage people to execute faster.”

Growing rapidly with Asana, inside the company and out in the world

Across TheSoul Publishing, Asana has improved execution and brought departments together. Clarity around responsibilities and deadlines helps people finish tasks on time, meaning that TheSoul Publishing can execute faster on new ideas, produce more engaging content for their fans, and have more freedom to experiment and innovate.