Digital media moves fast. Fall behind and your consumers will simply go somewhere else. So it makes organisations operating in this sector place an immense amount of value on staying organised and streamlined. Here at SmartCompany — along with our fellow mastheads under the Private Media banner — we’ve met these needs head-on by adopting a highly versatile work management platform.
Ai Mawdsley, COO of Private Media, took some time to share her insights on how Asana has become an integral tool for the team, and how it continues to drive new efficiencies across the board.
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While it hasn’t always been the case, today you’ll find Asana being used by all of Private Media’s major teams. Each team in the company has its own unique needs and workflows, so the work management platform needed to be adaptable enough to fit into the engineering team’s way of working just as much as the marketing department’s style. One of the best examples of this, according to Mawdsely, is how Asana serves as a Kanban-style requests board for all the teams.
“We use Asana for marketing requests, for creative design tasks, collaboration, for tickets for both the dev and ops teams,” she says. “It helps stakeholders see how requests are progressing — from creation to review and, finally, to completion.”
Having such broad visibility across all departments has transformed the way SmartCompany manages tasks and prioritises work. Nothing falls through the cracks, Asana is where our work connects — a problem in the past with less-competent work management systems.
“Previously for our content planning, it was all done in Slack, where the history often got lost and it was all just shouting noise,” Mawdsely says. “Now, we have a single source of truth that is easy to navigate, allowing our editors to see the status of each story — whether it’s been written, subbed or held back by legal.” Slack functions more as a stream of consciousness (organised by themes) which is great for live conversations but terrible for a single source of truth for tracking who does what by when.
Asana is even being used to manage the company’s product roadmap, which governs the pipeline of work for developers, data teams and marketing. The platform helps to visualise when key milestones are happening over the course of a year and helps the entire business stay aligned on long-term goals. For small businesses juggling multiple projects at once, the task management and project visualisation capabilities of Asana make it stand out from the crowd.
Mawdsley has long been a fan of Asana, even using it to organise her day-to-day home life. So it made sense that she was keen to champion it as a task management platform for everyone at Private Media — who prior to her arrival had been juggling multiple platforms and using them in ways that they hadn’t been designed for.
Over the course of several months, which has now sprawled into several years, the adoption of Asana at Private Media didn’t just bring organisation — it delivered a significant increase to the team’s efficiency. Before Asana, task management was chaotic, with much of it happening in Slack.
“Slack wasn’t organised by prioritisation, so it was very difficult to filter tasks to say, ‘Hey, this is actually urgent’ or ‘You can do this in two months’ time, I don’t really mind’. Whereas with Asana we can prioritise so much better and easily filter between urgent and non-urgent requests.” Having clarity on tasks across multiple projects means that teams aren’t duplicating work and they always have clear visibility and transparency over their daily operations.
The proof is in the pudding. While it’s hard to quantify what efficiency actually looks like — at least with hard metrics — Asana has had a positive impact on Private Media’s teams through helping to reduce emails, back-and-forth communications on tasks and time spent in status meetings. Assuming this efficiency gain saved each employee 30 minutes of time a week, this would translate to $67,000 a year in time saved to spend on other activities.
“We used to have four developers with a head of dev as the gatekeeper,” Mawdsley says. “And whilst it was good to have one central person to go through, he was drowning in reactive work. Since adopting Asana throughout the business, and standardising our platform approach across our mastheads, we’re now down to two developers and have a much more robust framework for prioritising tasks. It’s allowing us to manage ambitious company-wide projects more effectively, with fewer resources.”
Mawdsley uses Asana for all her own task management as COO, from overseeing finance and legal to handling HR and office admin. As a jill-of-all-trades, she recognises the value of integrating such a platform into SMEs that perhaps don’t have the same headcount or resources as a larger operation.
“Setting up Asana in a small business is very manageable,” she says. “It helps with that feeling of overwhelm that comes with having to juggle multiple roles and responsibilities. I can set up priorities for myself in order to manage what I focus on this week vs. next month. And I know who is doing what and by when.
“The top challenge for all business owners is about how to stay ‘big picture’ in leading your team and making the right decisions at a strategic level, even while constantly being pulled in different directions to put out fires. But if you have some sort of task management system like Asana in place, it can really help you feel like you’re on top of things.”
Asana empowers organisations to work smarter. Asana has over 150,000 customers and millions of users in 200+ countries and territories. Small to large organisations rely on Asana to manage everything from goal setting and tracking to capacity planning, to product launches. Asana is a comprehensive work management tool designed to help individuals and teams keep track of tasks, delegate responsibilities, monitor progress, and communicate in real-time. For more information, visit www.asana.com.
