Tea s.p.a. accelerates project implementation by 30% with Asana

At any given time, Tea has dozens of large projects running simultaneously with many stakeholders. The company’s IT department, headed up by Chief Information Officer Andrea Cobelli, is responsible for building and maintaining the systems needed to support those projects. His department of 17 is responsible for application and systems development, maintenance, integration between applications, and IT project management.

The department faced several challenges. Between a lack of centralised information systems and overreliance on emails and spreadsheets, they struggled to manage human and financial resources.

We were relying on emails, manual file transfers, and way too many spreadsheets. It was hard to find what we needed. People found it hard to stay on topic in email chains, which meant we had even less visibility and things were often missed or forgotten.”

The department needed a solution to its resource management problem. Team members routinely worked long hours but never quite achieved the results required. On top of this, Alessandro identified several other challenges:

• Lack of accountability led to delays and missed opportunities.

• Lack of visibility made it difficult to make informed decisions.

• Vital information was sometimes lost.

• Communication with internal and external stakeholders was uncoordinated.

The department needed a project management solution to help it streamline operations, improve efficiency, and communicate effectively with stakeholders—and time was a critical factor.

Identifying the right work management solution

Among the greatest challenges for the modern workforce is the increasing volume of ’work about work.’ This includes tasks like communication and follow-up, searching for information, switching between tools, managing priorities, and tracking work status. The Anatomy of Work Index found that these coordination tasks consume around 60% of an average information worker’s time, while just 26% of their time is spent on the tasks they were hired to complete.

For Tea, inefficiencies like these affected teams’ ability to fulfil their objectives. This was one of the key drivers behind the selection of Asana as the company’s new work management tool. To minimize inefficiencies, the IT department at Tea needed a solution that met five essential criteria:

1. Replace disparate legacy systems and processes.

2. Enable the department to develop and maintain dynamic processes and capabilities.

3. Provide time visualisation tools (particularly Gantt charts) to support project management.

4. Improve time and resource management across the department and project portfolio.

5. Improve collaboration between team members and internal and external stakeholders.

On top of these needs, Alessandro had two main drivers for evaluating potential solutions: cost and deployment time. The ideal solution would address each of the department’s five essential criteria while coming in within budget and supporting a rapid delivery timetable.

The project team took a greenfield approach to their evaluation, looking far and wide for the ideal solution. After reviewing some of the top tools in the market, they were impressed by Asana’s quick responses to their queries and began assessing the tool in more depth. 

Luisa , a member of the IT department, had used Asana at a previous organisation. After seeing it in action, she noted how easy teams had found Asana to adopt. It supported them to work in their preferred ways while benefiting from a significant efficiency boost. In short, it drove projects forward instead of holding them back like legacy static systems had. Luisa explains:

I had used Asana before in a previous company, and I had seen how smoothly it enables projects to run. People are much more involved in projects because they are triggered and reminded about what they need to do. It’s so simple to use, and it doesn’t require people to remember every detail. Once you start using Asana, you want to use it more.”

Implementing and driving adoption of Asana

The project team started the rollout of Asana on a small scale. The IT department kicked off first, starting with the application development team. They implemented Asana to see how it could be shaped to complement and improve existing workflows and processes, which relied on a combination of email and static spreadsheets.

Following a successful implementation, the project team rolled out Asana across the entire IT department. From there, the project team developed a phased plan to roll Asana out to the rest of the business, starting with all internal departments and teams, followed by suppliers, and finally, all external business partners.

It was easy for us to design our training sessions because Asana is so intuitive. Everybody understood it easily, and adoption among other teams was very smooth.”

Alessandro highlights flexibility as a major benefit, noting that creating projects to support multiple work styles has made Asana easy for teams to adopt and use quickly. The solution’s hierarchical structure makes it simple to organise teams, projects, and tasks while enabling easy cross-collaboration between internal and external stakeholders.

How Tea uses Asana to boost project speed and efficiency

Tea has seen extremely high levels of adoption among early Asana users. Everybody onboarded—internally and externally—enjoys working with Asana and appreciates how it enables projects to run more smoothly. The project team uses Asana to define, plan, and structure projects, leading to significant improvements in project efficiency, including:

• Reducing time to answer project requests by 1 hour.

• Accelerating project implementation by 30%.

Asana also helps Tea improve cross-functional collaboration, providing a fast, simple channel for communication between internal and external stakeholders. By improving information collection, dissemination, and visibility, Asana helps Tea ensure consistent execution across all projects and empowers individual users to manage their workload more effectively.

By having Asana notify people when something needs to be done, we’ve had a change of perspective about how we can run projects. Instead of us having to trigger important actions within a project, now Asana triggers us. We’re able to be much more proactive instead of constantly reacting to things.”

These collaboration and efficiency benefits are the culmination of Tea’s strong user adoption and use of Asana’s individual features, integrations, and tools. Asana has enabled Tea to:

• Save time and avoid accidental data loss by transferring information into Asana directly from emails using the Gmail plugin.

• Ensure consistency and eliminate time-consuming back-and-forth communications by using Forms and Custom Fields to standardize project and task creation.

• Streamline tasks and workflows by using Asana’s Rules feature to automatically assign tasks to team members, move tasks between projects, and enable projects to interact.

• Create customised reports and dashboards to track KPIs and give managers and leaders instant oversight across the organisation’s wide range of projects and portfolios.

• Visualization of metrics for projects and programs profitability, identifying which departments are at risk and which need a tactical analysis

• Measure suppliers KPI and SLAs in order to report on progress

Realising ‘hard’ benefits in the real world

Recently, the IT team at Tea took on a large development project to help the company maintain compliance with Italian water quality legislation. They needed to build the structure for water quality data collection and monitoring and organise data so it could be easily analysed and extracted to meet compliance requirements.

Around 50 people are involved, with 15 key stakeholders from Tea and its external supplier enrolled in Asana. Currently working on stage two of the three-stage project, the team has already benefited from the solution.

The project team noted Asana’s role in improving communication between internal and external stakeholders. In particular, the combination of Forms and Custom Fields makes it easy to ensure all necessary information is collected and made available to relevant stakeholders.

Through this and other key functions, Asana has enabled Tea to accelerate project implementation by an incredible 30% and deliver a higher quality of project management than previous manual systems.

Asana creates visibility for us and our suppliers, but it also improves the quality of data collection and project management. The ease of use is great, but it’s not the only metric we’re interested in. Asana has helped us run more efficient and more effective projects.”

What’s next for Tea?

So far, the team has rolled out Asana to individuals involved in specific projects. After seeing the value Asana brings to cross-functional collaboration, alignment, and visibility, they will now focus on rolling the solution out to the entire organisation.

Starting immediately, the team will begin enrolling users from other areas of the business, regardless of whether they are involved with IT projects. Alessandro and his team firmly believe Asana can help teams throughout the business realise many of the same benefits the IT department already enjoys.