Asana launches enterprise-level workplace tools for prioritization and planning

Work management platform Asana has rolled out a new suite of features and product integrations designed to automatically give enterprise leaders a holistic view of progress against strategic initiatives to inform resource allocations and planning. Asana’s latest offerings aim to help organizations rapidly shift priorities as business needs change with new goals reporting, decrease duplicate cross-functional work and waste costs with an integrated tech stack, and scale global security with enterprise security features.

Changing market conditions and unpredictable supply chain issues are forcing organizations to adapt fast–just 11% of organizations believe their current business models will be economically viable through 2023, according to a 2021 survey from McKinsey.

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As enterprise leaders begin planning for the coming year, they need tools to move quickly as priorities change, maximize resources to meet ambitious company goals, and connect work between teams to increase efficiency while ensuring data security, Asana said in its statement about this news.

Asana features that align with enterprise-grade goals

Because distributed team structures are prevalent within many enterprises, it is critical for executives to have easier visibility into progress against strategic initiatives as well as accountability for business outcomes. Now, enterprises have access to advanced reporting and dashboards for goals, built on Asana’s Work Graph.

These updates were designed to give executives a bird’s eye view into the status of their organization’s goals, which projects and portfolios are driving goal progress, impact on business outcomes, and roadblocks, according to Asana. Goals in Asana can be connected with tools like Salesforce to automatically update ongoing goal progress. Goal status can be communicated across teams and entire organizations through reports and dashboards to make sure everyone is moving in the same direction, the company said. Goal snapshots were built to surface key information at a glance for leaders.

In addition to reporting, Asana is designed to help teams leverage more data to aid planning. New native time-tracking features aim to help leaders better manage timelines by estimating how long projects and tasks will take, informing resource allocation and team workloads.

Increasing cross-functional efficiencies

The majority of work is done across multiple departments, according to the company, yet collaboration is challenging, and resources are wasted due to disconnected tools. “With new ways to bring data from dozens of external tools into Asana, Asana becomes a centralized work hub where cross-functional teams can better track work being done together, avoid time-consuming redundancies, minimize costs, and decrease errors,’’ the company said in a statement about the launch.

By expanding the ability to connect tools to Asana at every stage of a workflow, the goal is for cross-functional teams to streamline work and stay up to date on progress by automatically turning updates within external apps into trackable tasks in the system.

For example, teams can get immediate visibility into technical incidents through new Asana rules integrations with Twilio, notifying individuals of urgent tasks via SMS, as well as PagerDuty, automatically alerting teams by creating an incident for a timely response, according to the company.

Additionally, a new Asana for Workplace from Meta integration is designed to allow teams to turn Workplace conversations into actionable tasks, manage team projects and coordinate work without switching tools.

“The future of work is now cross-functional. There is a significant need to orchestrate collaboration across the enterprise, align around organizational goals, facilitate effective collaboration, and share project information quickly and easily,” said Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president of social and collaboration at IDC. “With new software integrations from the Asana partners ecosystem, organizations are enabled to move initiatives forward faster together–wherever they are located.”

Security partnerships to add more features

With enterprise tool proliferation, data security is a top concern for IT leaders. Asana’s new security features are designed to give organizations the tools to audit what information is entered into Asana, flag vulnerabilities and maintain compliance within highly regulated industries.

A series of partnerships are also planned. A new data loss prevention integration with industry leader Nightfall will soon enable teams to scan for sensitive data within Asana, such as social security or credit card numbers, the company said in the press release.

A new eDiscovery integration with legal tech innovator Hanzo aims to soon allow organizations to create defensible records from Asana projects, tasks and messages to investigate and respond to urgent incidents and litigation inquiries. Additional mobile app admin controls ensure data security and enable biometric authentication, the company said.

To help enterprises secure customer data and meet compliance standards, Asana is also launching additional global data centers in Australia and Japan. To help teams manage compliance, a new partnership with Theta Lake will offer a compliance review and archiving solution to meet industry standards with confidence. A HIPAA-compliant version of Asana is also available.

What makes Asana unique in this software space

Asana’s lead competitors in market size include Atlassian, Smartsheet, monday.com, and Wrike, among others, Kurtzman told TechRepublic.

“Asana was early in the market to use a graph database, the Asana Work Graph, as they call it, to identify relationships between work, the information about the work, and the people doing the work,” he said. “This cascades to new forms of notifications and metrics that make Asana unique in this respect.”

Kurtzman added that, “More than ever, technology and collaborative behaviors are enabling us to blend space and place–into a workspace. Products [like Asana] become more powerful and easier to use when the complete tech stack is integrated into the flow of work.”

For more details about Asana and its competitors, read TechRepublic’s review of the 10 best project management software and tools for 2022.