The Melbourne School of Professional and Continuing Education breaks down silos and manages complex client projects with Asana

The Melbourne School of Professional and Continuing Education (MSPACE) creates award and non-accredited courses for learners and organisations who want to upskill their teams. With expert input, MSPACE delivers custom, cutting-edge courses on topics like leadership and cybersecurity. Two University of Melbourne Departments merged to create MSPACE. 

The merger united specialist teams in online and custom education and was a response to increasing demand for post-professional education. A merger creates a range of challenges as teams work to integrate and scale. Throw in a global pandemic and remote work, and the challenge is even more pronounced. MSPACE needed a tool to boost alignment company-wide so every team could work together more efficiently and reach for the same goals. 

Mat Tinker is the Learning Design Manager at MSPACE. Mat’s role is to ensure MSPACE delivers high-quality learning experiences. Whether it’s an online leadership course, or a hybrid course about sustainability, Mat and the team are dedicated to ensuring professional learners get the most out of their education. Mat collaborates with everyone from academics to the production and marketing teams. Through this role, Mat learned every team had a unique way of working and that better collaboration would come from breaking down silos.

Our teams are very competent and specialised. We wanted to be more agile to thrive in a post-COVID world and needed an easy-to-use tool to help around 100 employees get aligned and become more responsive to a changing environment.”

Finding a tool to break down silos 

Every team at MSPACE had a slightly different understanding of the school’s overall mission. Collaborating involved sorting through a myriad of spreadsheets, CRM systems and databases. Information was scattered and teams spent a lot of time coordinating work. For example, getting a quote ready for a client involved numerous emails, spreadsheets and meetings. Colleagues didn’t always understand how their work contributed to larger product and customer goals.

Mat and the team searched for a solution to centralise work in one place, improve collaboration and suit different styles of working. Asana’s simple interface and Goals feature attracted attention as did the ability to add the same task to multiple projects. The goals feature promised to get everyone on the same page while and the ability to share the same task would allow teams to work flexibly. 

Being able to add a task to multiple projects is a real winner for us. It helped us convince other teams to use Asana because every team can work in their own way while still remaining highly collaborative and not duplicating tasks.”

Introducing Asana to MSPACE 

Asana’s Customer Success Managers partnered with the team at MSPACE to successfully launch the platform. Customer Success helped MSPACE implement Asana by:

• Devising an implementation plan and governance structures. 

• Providing training webinars so all team members could confidently use the platform. 

• Educating the leadership team on the OKR process and how to roll it out company-wide. 

• Being on hand for ongoing support. 

Based on expert guidance, Asana was first introduced to the teams that stood to benefit most from the platform. Once Asana was proven to fast track collaboration other teams were happily introduced to the platform. 

We’re enormously grateful for the partnership we have with Asana’s Customer Success team. Knowing we had a partner behind us who knows the journey that we’re on, a journey that we don’t know we’re on ourselves, has been incredibly helpful. The team is always there to provide us with sound advice and encouragement.”

Working smarter and winning new clients 

Asana has completely changed how MSPACE operates. All project work across the school is centralised in one platform which makes collaboration faster and easier. For example, it’s now much simpler for proposal, tender, and development teams to put together proposals and create quotes for clients. Both teams work off the same Asana project which cuts out the need for internal emails and reduces the risk of miscommunication. 

Using the Overview tab in a project, the product team details client needs and then assigns the project to the right experts for insight. With this method, information is all in the same place and deadlines are clear. The speed at which all stakeholders can validate sales quotes and create proposals has seen MSPACE increase their competitive edge and win big-name clients who may have otherwise been harder to reach.  

Another great win for MSPACE has been vastly improved alignment thanks to Goals. Learning about OKRS helped the leadership team create a 2022 strategy that features four key pillars, all of which are documented in Asana through OKRS captured in Goals. This type of goal setting has helped the entire business communicate and execute on plans more effectively. All employees have a clear understanding of how their work ladders up and everyone is working harder to track and measure their work against wider company goals. 

Along with the Goals feature, the team uses Portfolios to manage and track work. Projects are tracked from ideation to delivery and evaluation using Portfolios. It’s been a huge win for the team to be able to view how projects are performing using the Portfolio reporting features.   

Clear goals have helped teams do better with forward planning, everyone is now thinking one to three years into the future. 

The Goals feature has helped us collectively improve how we focus and deliver on our strategy so we can win big-name clients and offer value to our academic faculty partners. It’s enormously satisfying to know we are commercially responsive and agile.”

Moving forward 

Overall, the team at MSPACE is working much more productively. The plan now is to continue to use Asana in a more sophisticated way. This includes looking to improve on data collection and reporting so teams can better quantify their impact and further integrating Asana into the company’s wider tech stack to automate tasks. The team at Asana look forward to helping MSPACE become even more productive now, and in the future.