World Resources Institute scales global impact and saves 1,000+ work days annually with Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Disconnected tools and lack of centralized data tracking led to inefficiencies, duplicate efforts, information silos, and challenges in assessing progress and aligning work with goals, hindering comprehensive monitoring and reporting.

• Project and enterprise risk tracking was inconsistent and fragmented, with risks tracked in various formats, leaving gaps in visibility, accountability, and global risk response.

• Inconsistent workflows and lack of standardized project management approaches slowed productivity, limited real-time visibility, and obstructed effective planning, implementation, and decision-making.

• Ineffective cross-collaboration across countries and with stakeholders, through disparate communication channels, led to operational bottlenecks and challenges in coordination and project delivery.

• Unclear roles and responsibilities led to lack of accountability, confusion in task prioritization, and delays in decision-making.

Solution

• Centralized project management tool and enhanced cross-functional collaboration: Asana unifies project and work management in a central hub where teams collaborate, stay aligned, manage timelines, assess progress, and handle all aspects of their work consistently.

• Streamlined workflows and automations: Structured processes, workflows, and automations reduce manual tasks and inefficiencies, enabling teams to focus on high-impact work.

• Improved risk management: A comprehensive Enterprise Risk and Project Management system leverages Asana templates and automations to enhance visibility and responsiveness to risks.

• Real-time insights and reporting: Dashboards, portfolios, templates, and integrations enable teams to access real-time insights, align work with goals, and streamline reporting.

• Clear roles: Clarity on roles and responsibilities reduces confusion, facilitates transparency and accountability, and eliminates delays in decision-making.

Outcomes

• Saved 8,055 hours (1,000+ workdays) in 2023 through automated workflows

• Unified nearly 2,000 employees for greater alignment and collaboration

• Facilitated 343,648 cross-functional collaborations across teams, breaking down silos

• Standardized enterprise risk management across over 20 teams globally

Transforming WRI’s global collaboration

WRI adopted Asana to centralize work, increase transparency and streamline collaboration, giving its global teams the tools needed to work more efficiently. By connecting work to strategic goals and offering real-time visibility, Asana transformed how WRI operates—helping the organization tackle complex initiatives at scale.

Our mission to achieve global impact for people, nature, and climate requires a scalable, interconnected work system to support increasingly complex operations. We selected Asana for its capacity to unify our workflows, break down silos, and enhance transparency and accountability across a matrixed structure.”

By centralizing work, standardizing processes, and increasing transparency, Asana has become a cornerstone for  WRI’s work—enhancing the organization’s ability to deliver equitable access, restore ecosystems, and mitigate climate change impacts. This use of Asana earned the organization the Asana’s Social Impact Work Innovation Award, which recognizes their use of innovative processes to drive lasting change and create a more sustainable world. 

If we’re not operating effectively, it impacts our ability to deliver on our promises. Asana helps us ensure we’re meeting the outcomes we’ve committed to—whether to our donors, partners, or the people and ecosystems we serve.”

Tailoring adoption to meet unique team needs

When WRI began its journey with Asana in 2022, the organization had 800 licenses scattered across various teams—resulting in fragmented usage and inconsistent adoption. Recognizing the need for a more unified approach to managing work, they teamed up with Asana’s Professional Services team to support training efforts and encourage adoption. 

Instead of relying on mass trainings, the implementation team developed a tailored approach that prioritized meeting users where they were—whether on an individual, project, programmatic, or organizational level. This included:

• Team-specific sessions that addressed each teams’ unique challenges, with a focus on tangible solutions and showing immediate value.

• Country-by-country rollouts that focused on small groups and one-on-one interactions. 

• Personalized trainings that highlighted Asana’s flexibility and showcased how the platform could empower each team to simplify their workflows and work smarter.

Today, just over 2,000 employees across more than 60 teams rely on Asana—a 140% increase in just two years—making it a strategic enabler for WRI’s global collaboration.

People often think of project management as rigid, but it’s not, because every project is unique. That’s why we focused on showing teams how they can use Asana in ways that fit their specific needs, wherever they are—whether at the individual level, on a project-by-project basis, at the program level, or across the entire organization.”

Driving alignment and efficiency across global teams

WRI adopted Asana to address the complexity of their global initiatives. By leveraging the platform, they transformed how teams work together, enabling the organization to better deliver on its commitments to donors, partners, and communities.

Strengthening collaboration across regions and partners

• Centralizing work in Asana gives everyone visibility into relevant portfolios and projects, enabling team members to view what’s happening in real time.

• Teams collaborate seamlessly across regions, accessing updates directly in the platform instead of having to wait for colleagues to get online.

• External partners are invited into shared projects, facilitating collaboration in one centralized space.

• Integrations with tools like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint ensure teams can seamlessly convert emails into tasks and link live files to projects, keeping everyone aligned and eliminating version control issues.

Connecting work to strategic goals for greater impact

• WRI uses Asana’s Goals feature to provide visibility into institutional goals and priorities, fostering a shared understanding across the organization of how individual work contributes to the broader mission.

• Goals are visible across teams, strengthening alignment and clarity on how specific work connects to and drives impact.

• This visibility supports planning and prioritization on both a team and organizational level, with leaders able to access insights that help them allocate resources effectively and track progress toward strategic goals.

Saving time and increasing efficiency with standardization and automation

• Teams leverage Asana, including the platform’s AI features, to automate manual work, saving over 8,000 hours annually—approximately 1,000 work days per year—and creating more time for high-impact tasks. 

• Using Smart Status, teams quickly generate project and portfolio summaries, keeping stakeholders updated on progress and priorities with minimal effort and reducing the need for frequent meetings.

• Smart Fields automatically generate custom fields specific to WRI’s projects, allowing teams to kick off work faster, maintain consistency across tasks, and track data effectively for streamlined reporting.

• Asana’s rules automate routine tasks, such as moving tasks between sections, notifying team members of critical updates, and updating custom fields based on task selections.

• Intake forms streamline the request process, eliminating the need to manually scan emails and creating a consistent workflow.

Templates for managing risks, deliverables, lessons learned, Project planning  (for executives), and other critical work management processes drive efficiency, save time, and promote consistency, replacing outdated tools like decks and spreadsheets.

By placing our institutional priorities in Asana Goals, we’ve improved transparency across the organization. Many teams now use Goals to clearly see how their efforts ladder up and align with team objectives. ”

Fueling urban transformation with streamlined project management

WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities is World Resources Institute’s program dedicated to shaping a future where cities work better for everyone, tackling some of the most complex challenges facing urban areas today like inequality, sustainability, and climate change. Operating in more than 150 cities across 75 countries, the program’s work spans diverse initiatives such as improving public transit, developing resilient water systems, and advocating for the adoption of electric vehicles.

To manage these projects on a global scale, the program needed a better way to connect teams, standardize processes, and improve data accuracy. With Asana, they created a central hub for collaboration, streamlining processes across cities so teams can execute projects successfully, like those from WRI Brasil that supported the development of a public policy promoting zero-emission vehicles in freight transport.

Standardized practices drive better project outcomes

• WRI Ross Center centralized all programmatic and project work in Asana, giving teams real-time visibility into project details and fostering collaboration across regions. 

• Complex initiatives spanning teams and locations are tracked in centralized projects, so teams can see all details in one place and easily share updates.

• To create accountability and clarity, project and task owners are assigned in Asana, clearly defining roles and responsibilities. 

• Standardized templates for management of grants, sub-agreements, risks and issues, deliverables, and lessons learned ensure every project follows a consistent workflow, streamlining production across the program. 

• A standardized naming system within Asana categorizes projects by country and donor, making even global initiatives easy to locate.   

Improved data management empowers smarter decisions

• All project data was transitioned from a previous tool to Asana to facilitate automated extraction, cleaning, and verification using the Asana API and programming languages, with the processed data feeding into dashboards. 

• With all project information connected to portfolios, teams have access to real-time insights, enabling them to plan effectively and report impact to donors accurately. 

Reports created using dashboards provide actionable insights, driving more informed decisions at programmatic and project levels.

Asana is playing a crucial role in our goal of fully systematizing and automating project management processes; increasing transparency across the global network; and easily generating reports and relevant decision-making information.”

Strengthening resilience with proactive risk management

As a global organization operating across diverse regions, WRI faces a wide range of risks—political, institutional, financial, and beyond. Managing these risks effectively is critical to maintaining resilience and advancing the organization’s mission. 

Previously, enterprise risk management was narrowly focused on tracking financial risks in spreadsheets, leaving gaps in visibility and planning. Today, WRI’s comprehensive enterprise risk management (ERM) framework has redefined how the organization identifies, assesses, and mitigates risk.

WRI sought to regularize and standardize its identification, classification, and communication of business risks. Our risk management and Asana teams collaborated to establish a centralized Asana risk register … helping us address issues ranging from partner vetting to overdue receivables.”

Standardized processes improve risk reporting and response

• A standardized risk register, built in an Asana template, ensures consistency in how risks are identified, assessed, and reported globally.

• Each country maintains its own risk register, allowing managers to assess risks across regions.

• Teams can compare risks across regions and develop tailored response strategies, improving global risk management. 

• Individual risk registers feed into a consolidated risk register portfolio, providing leadership with a clear, organization-wide view of risk exposure. 

Custom fields improve visibility and understanding of risks 

• Within each risk register, custom fields capture critical details such as risk type, underlying conditions, impact areas, and response strategy, fostering a proactive approach to risk management.

• Teams also use these fields to track key risk markers—such as whether a risk is stable, improving, or worsening—helping them define and monitor response strategies like mitigating, monitoring, or transferring the risk.

• From this data, teams generate comprehensive risk reports that are shared with leadership, improving their understanding of risk implications and supporting the development of response strategies.

Automation ensures timely escalation

• Using Asana’s rules, leadership is automatically notified when critical risks require their attention, reducing response times and ensuring urgent risks are addressed promptly.  

• For example, when a project risk is flagged as “institutional” using their Asana project risk management template, the institutional risk manager is automatically tasked to review the risk and escalate it if necessary, ensuring timely action. 

Reports and dashboards enhance planning 

• Dashboards consolidate risk data, so leaders can quickly assess upcoming and current risks, align on strategies, and prioritize resources effectively.

• Quarterly reviews now use risk registers as a central guide, allowing leaders to take action based on real-time data in Asana rather than outdated spreadsheets or informal discussions.

With our Asana risk register, teams can better identify risks, gain clearer visibility into how they're addressed, and what needs attention. This supports our efforts to cultivate a culture where everyone understands their responsibility to consider risk in all aspects of our work.”

Creating a sustainable future with AI 

As WRI continues to scale its operations and expand its global impact, Asana will remain a critical tool for driving alignment, efficiency, and innovation across teams and regions. 

Key future initiatives include expanding the use of the enterprise and project risk management system, including leveraging Asana’s AI-driven automation to enhance risk assessment and decision-making. Looking ahead, WRI envisions Asana’s AI features, like chat capabilities and automated workflows, playing a transformative role in further optimizing workflows and driving action. With Asana as a foundational platform, WRI is positioned to deliver on its mission to create a sustainable future—one project at a time.

Asana will be foundational as we scale our operations globally, automate processes to increase efficiency and ensure work aligns with WRI’s strategy and policies. Leveraging Asana’s AI-driven tools should support smarter management, analysis, and decision-making, reducing administrative burdens so our teams can focus on high-impact work and outcomes worldwide.”