Morningstar saves an estimated $758,600 annually with Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Operational inefficiencies and a complex tech stack made it difficult to scale work at pace with aggressive growth goals.

• Employees used different tools to manage their work, which kept information siloed and made priorities unclear.

• Leadership lacked visibility into teams’ end-to-end roadmaps, making it hard to manage risk and make informed decisions.

• The absence of a standardized way to manage resources and track projects led to overworked resources and missed deadlines.

Solution

• Morningstar’s core business functions adopted Asana to manage work, connect data, and standardize business processes.

• By consolidating multiple tools to bring all their work together in Asana they can make smarter, faster decisions.

• With clear visibility into upcoming work and work requests, leaders could make data-backed decisions that informed work and strategy.

• Standardizing project intake improved roadmapping prioritization and delivery timelines.

Outcomes

• Saves an estimated $758,600 annually

• Saves 1,972 work days annually

• Faster, data-backed decision-making and risk mitigation

• Better resource forecasting for clearer planning

• Improved prioritization and focus on high-value work

• Accelerated collaboration and increased productivity at scale

• Reduced low-priority work, leading to time savings

Asana helps us drive efficiencies that scale and foster the growth that’s needed. We’ve broken down barriers for collaboration across the organization.”

Driving digital transformation across Morningstar

Morningstar’s Central Technology team plays a critical role in driving forward the company’s digital transformation, making sure they’re growth-ready. This work involves modernizing the employee experience through infrastructure, tools, security, and processes needed to scale effectively. A key part of this success is enabling effective collaboration and streamlining workflows across teams—which they achieve with Asana.

Updating tech throughout the organization

• To meet the company’s ambitious growth goals, Morningstar’s Central Technology team needed to implement the right tools and technology. The upgraded infrastructure had to improve processes, connect information, and reduce redundant work, so the company could scale.

• Asana made this possible by offering a flexible solution that worked across different lines of business and scaled with the organization.

Balancing standardization with needs-based flexibility

Each business unit within Morningstar—such as marketing, product, finance, and HR—uses the company’s standardized project management framework within Asana. This approach ensures consistency across the organization while also allowing teams to adjust their workflows in Asana to meet their specific needs.

By streamlining workflows and scaling efficiencies with Asana, Morningstar saved 1,972 work days annually—which translates to an estimated $758,600 in cost savings.

Our company-wide goal is to scale with effective and efficient processes. We're on a rapid growth trajectory. Our strategy has to give employees the right tech that can support and empower them as we scale. That's why Asana is our preferred work management tool.”

Scale efficiencies with streamlined processes

Before Asana, the Central Technology team didn’t have a standardized way to intake or kick off work. They relied on a Word document to track the hundreds of requests they received each year from across the organization. This manual process didn’t provide the structure needed to properly scope, resource, budget, and approve project requests, leading to a clogged backlog and projects with unclear scopes and objectives.

By creating a standardized process in Asana, the team automates work intake and simplifies prioritization. This approach allows them to efficiently manage the growing workload as the business scales. 

Help teams execute faster with standardized intake requests

• Work intake processes are standardized and automated in Asana, making it easier to quickly evaluate, prioritize, and approve requests with greater consistency.

• New work requests are submitted using an Asana form and automatically populate in a shared project, ensuring all necessary information is captured for immediate visibility and action.

• Custom fields track standardized evaluation criteria, helping stakeholders make faster, more consistent decisions on approvals and prioritization.

Our intake process in Asana helps us harness our action-driven culture in a more productive and organized way, so we spend our time in the right way and on the right things.”

Increase clarity and accountability with project organization

• Leaders gain full visibility into every stage of the workflow, as all work is organized within connected projects and portfolios.

• With flexibility to slice and dice their work data, they can better assess work’s risk and value, enabling more informed decisions on prioritization.

• With approved projects in the portfolio, teams can easily report progress and demonstrate how it connects to high-level goals, enabling leaders to assess capacity, plan, and coordinate across functions more effectively.

Prior to Asana, we were kicking off projects left and right without management. Now we’re able to effectively funnel work as it comes in, which allows us to do more work as we grow.”

Increase productivity with data-driven prioritization and resource management

Before moving to Asana, Morningstar’s teams didn’t have a clear way to prioritize work—and they said yes to every request. That led to an overcommitted, overworked, and underperforming team.

With Asana, teams have a full view of project lifecycles and in-flight work, making it easier to understand capacity and strategically allocate resources to priority projects. Plus, they have the data to support those decisions.

Streamline work with a strategic system for managing resources

• Portfolios give leaders a high-level view of all projects in flight, their status and resources allocated

• With a better understanding of what needs to get done, by who—and why—teams can focus on saying “yes” to high-impact initiatives.

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

Before we migrated our projects to Asana, we were overcommitting all of the time. Now we have more intelligence and we have more data. We know what we can and can’t take on—and we can have the right conversations about prioritization and how projects align to our strategic plan.”

Data-backed resourcing decisions with real-time reporting

• Leaders use capacity planning to get a high-level view of how people are staffed across workstreams and optimize resourcing decisions.

• Access to accurate work data and reporting helps the team validate which projects do or don’t connect to business goals.

• With clarity on how upcoming and in-flight work impacts capacity, they have clear, data-backed trade-off discussions with stakeholders.

You don't have a strategy until you also say what you're not doing. Now, we have a process that allows us to say no. And we have stats on why we’re saying no, which helps us drive home the point—we have things that are priorities and things that aren’t.”

Roadmap smarter and launch projects faster with Asana AI

Morningstar’s process for evaluating work requests involves manually reviewing each request, following up on missing information, and gathering additional context from stakeholders to decide if each task should be added to the roadmap. This manual evaluation process leads to a lengthy roadmapping timeline that can delay the development of revenue-driving features.

By building Smart workflows for work intake with Asana AI Studio, Morningstar reduces timelines by an average of 2 weeks per completed workflow. Smart workflows reduce manual triage and back and forth, and provides recommendations based on the priority and scale of projects—getting the right work on the roadmap faster and reducing pre-development delays.

Previously, it took two weeks to review a request and gather the information we needed to proceed. Now we can eliminate time spent on manual back and forth because Asana AI identifies and captures the information we need right off the bat.”

Accelerate work intake with Asana AI Studio

• Building smart workflows in Asana AI Studio helps speed up and standardize Morningstar's intake process by ensuring stakeholders only receive fully vetted, review-ready submissions—driving more efficient roadmapping and faster launches.

• Roadmap requests are submitted via an Asana form, which populates directly into an intake project for easier project management.

• Asana AI automates manual review, evaluating each request against predefined criteria for sufficient information to proceed.

• When requests lack key details, Asana AI prompts the requester with qualifying questions until all criteria are met. This saves the team time and cuts down significantly on manual work.

• For quick and informed review, Asana AI provides actionable recommendations—like the priority and size of work, and what resources are needed to accomplish it.

Our roadmapping process was reactive and manual. Our ultimate goal with Asana AI is to make the process more strategic, so we can quickly prioritize work that will drive revenue and speed to market.”

Conclusion

As Morningstar moves toward their ambitious growth goals, they need a best-in-class solution that connects teams, simplifies processes, and enhances the ability to accomplish work at scale. That’s why they use Asana. By using a tool that adapts to the needs of different functions while also scaling, teams can collaborate more efficiently, move faster, and spend more time focused on the work that matters.