TOOLS OF THE TRADE: How to Use Asana to Monitor Your Strategic Plan

We are big fans of Asana at TSM. We use it for all of our internal project management, to monitor our company goals, and keep track of short-term and long-term tasks. Lately we have had a slew of clients move into Asana and we have begun helping to build strategic plan implementation tools within Asana as the last phase of strategic planning. We figure other people may have questions about this as well! This is certainly not an exhaustive list of tips and tools but should be enough to get you moving if your team is considering Asana or already using it.

Creating a Strategic Plan in Asana

You can build your own board but we suggest you use the Company Goals and Milestones Template as your base to get started. It has the right structure and it is built right inside of Asana so click, adapt, and you can be up and running rather quickly.

Goals and Strategies

Use each stream (Objective on template) to input Goals. Then you can use cards as strategies and subtasks as the tactics. This allows you to assign the strategies to teams, committees, or individuals and allows the use of individually assigned tactics. An alternate usage is to name the streams as years. Both have different abilities in the non-board views. Our general preference is goal orientation with year tags.

Considerations and Options

1. Consider assigning strategies to an internal team - be it a committee, a cross-functional work team, or other assembled group.

2. Consider Applying a Tag to add a color label to tasks affecting the same team or in the same impact area - see the red and blue tags above - those are linked to tags.

3. You can use the embedded progress trackers or change them to years, quarters, or add a separate field that will appear on the cards.

Here’s what the inside of a card can look like:

Do you have your plan organized differently? We would love to hear what you are doing to monitor progress and keep everything organized.