Facebook Co-Founder Socializes Task Management with the Release of Asana

By Rich Blank (@pmpinsights) Feb 10, 2011

2 comments

This week, Asana previewed a demo of their solution for collaboration to an open house. Who is Asana? It was an idea conceived two years ago by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and colleague Justin Rosenstein. Moskovitz and Rosenstein decided to start Asana after being frustrated with existing collaborative tools to get work done.

Asana’s Frustration with Collaboration

Here's how Rosenstein describes his frustration with existing organizational collaboration:

He described 90 percent of his time dealing with the "friction overhead of coordination" and the "work about the work".
He noticed knowledge workers using low-tech tools such as Notepad or Post-it notes to organize their work lives only occasionally updating a central repository. He said “The effect is that you can’t trust the information stored in that centralized repository,”
He also talks about his experience at Google (former employer) of trying different processes, tools, blogs or wikis, or whiteboards. However, something always seemed to fall through the cracks in spite of working with smart and highly organized individuals.
He also talked about after joining Facebook, Dustin as head of Facebook engineering didn't have a clear picture of what's going on in his organization.
A few times he also mentioned how organizations seem to be reinventing the wheel over and over again when it comes to these tools.

Many of us can identify with the frustrations of Rosenstein and Moskovitz. Passionate young energy zapped by organizational friction and lack of timely and free-flowing information. I share the same passion and frustrations as they do having spent the last fifteen years as both a certified Project Manager and consultant (specifically on collaboration technology) who has continually preached and evangelized that there is a better way to work with distributed teams of people. So what's the real problem Asana is trying to solve?

The Collaboration Problem

My interpretation of the problem Asana is trying to solve is that collaboration continues to happen via email. Email makes it incredibly difficult for anyone at any level to put some context around specific tasks, take the appropriate actions and ensure some coordinated effort exists towards whatever objective or deliverable the team is trying to achieve.

It doesn't matter if you're chair of the social committee or a certified project manager. Creating a task list is a no-brainer in any collaborative tool or Microsoft Word. However, in most cases, the real conversation happens independent of that task list — i.e. synchronously within email or conference calls or face to face meetings. As a result, much of the live discussions go unrecorded which creates more email and more confusion and more face to face meetings.

While a strong experienced Project Management Lead helps the overall coordination of effort, the fact is that many of us are project managers by accident. Even experienced PMs are on information overload most of the time.

Asana's Solution

Asana's approach to this "email and information overload problem" is a SaaS solution offering a simple task management tool for small teams or organizations. The Asana product focuses on what Rosenstein calls "speed and structure" which can be loosely translated as efficiency AND context of the information flow among the team members. And the intended results are more accountability and transparency in managing tasks.

Collaboration "In Context"

What sets Asana apart from other collaboration tools is what I call "collaboration in context". Their formula is simple: Asana = Projects + tasks + people + conversations. Think task management meets CRM.