How to use Asana to streamline your business processes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy2_Mqi7qyU

For a while now I have been looking for a better solution for all of my business processes. I used to have a word document but to be honest with the amount of processes in my business it just wasn’t cutting it.

I found Asana when I was looking for a solution to manage all of my client projects, but actually found it to be the perfect way I could systemise my own processes. So watch the video above about how I have implemented this into my business and YOU can too!

I wanted to create this really cool video for your today, to show you how I have implemented processes into my business, and how I’ve easily used Asana, an awesome online project management tool, to do this.

I’ve been in business for around 8-9 years now, and I’ve found, particularly when I was starting out, that I had everything just in my head; every project, every single item on my to-do-list, as well as all the different processes that I would use from the start to finish of a project. It was all just sitting in my head.

Firstly, this would make me insanely frazzled and overwhelmed, and I would just feel out of control even though I was ‘actually all over it’, it just wasn’t great in terms of me actual being able sit down and get a task done without worrying too often.

And secondly, the other thing is that I really wanted to bring in staff, I’ve always had a plan to grow my web design business and I wanted to bring other people on board to support me in doing this. I wanted my business to grow and I didn’t just want it to be me.  I wanted to be able to go on a holiday whenever I wanted, without it impacting the business.  By leaving and having everything ‘in my head’ my staff would be left saying… oh where are we up to, or how do we do this?

So for me, it just became a big priority for me to get everything out of my head and into specific processes that someone can simply come on in and follow those processes. Obviously it is still something that they need to learn and they obviously then learn the process but at least it’s all documented.

Initially, I had sort of created simple word documents with everything in them. I just felt like it was really difficult because I had to always open things up, documents would end up filed, and not easily accessible and it started becoming too confusing.

A couple of years back, I started using Asana to manage all of my projects. This is a fantastic tool, and just really simple to use. It’s also free, and allows you to add additional contractors and staff members in your team. There is a paid version you can upgrade too if you want to unlock more features, but I do find that I don’t really need to upgrade at this point in time but it’s definitely on the cards for down the track.

So I wanted to show you today, the way that I have implemented a lot of things into the procedures.

I am a massive fan of actually doing video tutorials so rather than actually creating word documents, I like to create videos of everything I am doing, because it just makes it easier and faster to teach someone else what I am doing, or how to do something. I am doing things already so by making a video of the process, it makes it very simple to explain processes for different tasks or requirements.

So you can use a tool called Jing, which is a great tool. There is also another program you can use, Camtasia, however this is more used for editing videos long term. So unless you are wanting to move into creating professional, edited videos, I wouldn’t really worry about that for now. Jing has a free version of the program. It uploads directly into Screencast, and I think you get 2GB of free storage, so you can just jump in. Even if you do need to upgrade, it doesn’t cost a lot of money.

So that’s what I use. I use Jing and I use Screencast to keep everything and then I basically record what I am doing.

So I’ve got these two projects here.

So number one is my web design project template.

So this is what happens every single time a client comes on board with a Website project, our team works through all of these processes. So I have all of these and it documents absolutely everything.

So follow up, we need to send a thank you email when I finish. We need to add them into our newsletter mailing list so that I can get information on how to use their site to them. And also send follow up emails.

It just makes it really easy for me and for anyone else, and I can assign all of these different tasks. So essentially what I’ll do is something will come in, and the client will say yes we want to go ahead. Well that’s great. Amazing!

So I will actually then assign creating of the contact of the client folder to my Admin Assistant. So she can assign that and I can give her a due date and then she can easily go through them and check it all off.

And the good thing is as well with this is that because of the way the system works, I can use this as a template and I can actually copy that over, without having to setup the structure from scratch every time.  You can click on here and copy project. So that will actually allow me to create as many projects as I want for my clients. So I can keep up to date with every single project to know where we’re at 100% of the time,

So that’s how I use Asana for my client processes.

Next is for my business processes

What we do is I have everything in here. So a lot of these things are things that we do for all of our clients but I want them to be accessible as well like I don’t want these edited.

So these are actually all of my things that we’ve got, like an email that goes to clients about their site going live. And we’ve actually got an email in here. Basically if I just say to my Administration Assistant, “Okay we’re about to go live for a site, can you please send them the go live process.” So they actually resend this over on my behalf from our support email address and it’ll say something along the lines of, “We are getting close on launching your project…” That just means we don’t have to always re-invent the wheel, because we are basically saying the same things to every single client. Obviously if we need to tweak them we do but it just saves a lot of time with having them as a template within Asana, that can be easily copied and tweaked and sent off. It’s a fantastic way to keep everything together, and at the click of a mouse.

So I move a lot of things in here. There are heaps of different things that we do so you know, ongoing supports, if we have people sign-up to our monthly maintenance package for example, what we do with that. So how we set up back-ups. When we complete them we also send another email.

The other thing we do is keep licenses in here, you can upload files also. It just makes it really simple, we’ve got everything in here in the one place.

So we’ve got your quotes, we’ve got the new client documents. Everything that I need in here. We’ve got our monthly hosting, so these are the things that we need to do, where things can be found, if we need the document for example. But more often than not, I actually upload the document in there so it does just depend on what we need to do.

So I thought I might quickly show you exactly what I do, but I basically have in here to create a contact form on a site. We have a very standard process so I just have a screencast in here. So if anyone comes in, and they need to know how to create a contact form, it’s just a matter of them clicking on a link and it opens up this video for them.

So it’s really a matter of just getting everything out of your head and onto that video, uploading it and you just do bits and pieces at a time. So for example, creating a contact form for a website is something that we do on every single website. So that is something that I want 100% systemised and I am putting in there so that no step at all is we missed when it comes to creating a contact form on a site.

We’d really love to hear from you all. We’d really love to know more about how you systemise in your business or maybe this is something that you’d like to have implemented in your business. I assure you that you will save a huge amount of money and time by doing something like this. You’ll feel really organised and empowered, and your productivity will increase substantially.

If you have any questions, make sure you ask away. You can pop onto our Facebook group or you can comment on the video below. I would love to hear from you there!

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