How to roll out Asana to your agency: tips from ThomasARTS

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Megan McKnight, Senior Technical Project Manager at ThomasARTS.

Call us pixel pushers, word warriors, or your neighborhood advertising gurus. In any case, ThomasARTS knows a little something about creativity—and hustling on a deadline. We’re located in offices across the U.S., but you can find us at the intersection of art and science, juggling timeline shifts or marketing fire drills and chasing our next big idea.

You could say that an ad agency is only as great as its talent. Take it from us: There’s something to be said about its organizational skills, too. Marketing for banks, healthcare giants, and global nonprofits meant we had to leverage the right project management tools. Here’s how we selected and rolled out Asana at ThomasARTs.

Defining the type of platform we needed

Project management tools are vital for our creative workflow—helping us deliver assets on time, facilitating team collaboration, tracking project status and more. That’s why just okay just wasn’t going to work for our team.

Once we realized our old PM software wasn’t working and after running an all-agency survey promising free gift cards, we learned a few things: First, our software wasn’t being fully utilized. Second, we were missing some key features and filling those voids with other collaboration tools. In a word, inefficient.

Then, we turned our survey responses into the ultimate project management wishlist, which included:

1. A holistic view of all projects

2. Easily personalized project dashboards

3. Project timelines

4. Customizable calendar views

Who doesn’t love an audit?

Once we’d identified our must-haves, TA began a feature comparison audit. We threw our old PM tool into the ring with Asana and a few other tools. No surprise, Asana seemed to be winning in spades.

Asana came with all the essentials and extras we could dream of, like:

• Customizable board views

• Resource forecasting using workload portfolios

• Task lists for employees

• Templates for quick task creation

• Easy integration with Outlook, Slack, Dropbox, and more

• Secure and able to meet IT requirements

• With a Professional Services team to help every step of the way

Still, it wasn’t over yet. We then identified how well the tools could integrate with our financial and time-tracking systems. From there, each software received a final score.

Ready, set, pitch

We were well on our way to project management greatness. First, TA needed buy-off from key stakeholders.

Our PM superstars joined forces to craft a pitch deck with survey stats, pricing and audit results. They discussed pain points of our current software and how well each new option might do instead. Leading us to one answer. Asana came in first place, promising a welcoming user experience and even unicorns. What more could we ask for?

Three cheers for Asana

With approval from the TA executive team, we launched an agency-wide Asana rollout followed by a post-mortem questionnaire. After all, we had to keep track of how well Asana delivered on everything we loved about it.

We took it to TA, asking creatives, account pros, and marketers alike:

• How would you rate the Asana rollout and implementation?

• What was your experience like with Asana trainings?

• Were there elements you didn’t like?

Plus, we couldn’t resist asking for everyone’s favorite Asana Appreciation. The quirkier, the better, apparently (Here’s looking at you, Yeti Riding a Unicorn).

TA’s experience rolling out Asana was jam-packed with learnings and new insights. Today, we use Asana for all of our projects from start to finish, to resource plan, sprint plan, and everything in between. Looking ahead, we’re excited to take advantage of the reporting and Goals features to track performance as well as Portfolios to organize projects. Thankfully, the Asana Professional Services team has been there every step of the way, ready to meet any question or request with the perfect solution. Their support has made all the difference. PM genius, achieved.