Definitely, Asana helps save times and efforts, to boost work effeciency! So, what is Asana project management? Should you try Asana project management software and what are its alternatives and supplements?
For the best business performance and productivity, most organizations divide employees into smaller sections such as functional, cross-functional, virtual and self-managed teams. They also set up project teams for short-term projects or task-forces teams when emergencies happen.
Thus, it is needed to remain efficacious team management to help the whole organization run smoothly and achieve company goals. Aside from teamwork skills, leadership skills, there are other techniques that can help to manage a team effectively such as Asana project management software.
Let's take a quick look about the introduction of Asana project management and other support tools for ultimate team management.
Table of Contents
- What Does Team Management Mean?
- How to manage your team effectively?
- Alternatives to Asana Project Management
- AhaSlides - 5 Useful Add-ons to Asana Project Management
- Key Takeaways
More Tips with AhaSlides
Looking for a tool to engage your team?
Gather your team members by a fun quiz on AhaSlides. Sign up to take free quiz from AhaSlides template library!
🚀 Grab Free Quiz☁️
What Does Team Management Mean?
The notion of team management can be simply understood as the capability of an individual or organization to operate and coordinate a group of people to complete a task. Team management consists of teamwork, collaboration, goal setting and productivity evaluation. Its primary purpose is to control and manage a group of employees to work toward a common goal compared to motivating and inspiring employees like team leadership.
In terms of team management, it is worth mentioning management styles, which refer to how managers plan, organize, make decisions, delegate, and control their staff. There are 3 main types of team management, all have both advantages and disadvantages, based on your team situation and background to reasonably apply.
- Autocratic management styles
- Democratic management styles
- Laissez-faire management styles
When it comes to team management, another important term is management team that is easily confused. Management team is about a job, indicating high-level associates who have authority to manage a team while team management is skills and techniques to manage a team more effectively.
How to Manage Your Team Effectively?
In any team, there are always problems that arise among team members that need leaders to deal with such as absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results, according to Patrick Lencioni and his The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. So how to improve team effectiveness?
Set aside team management skills, a recommendation for effective team administration is using project management software. In the age of digital and technology revolution, it is required for managers to know how to use this kind of tool. Asana project management tool is perfect for remote team, hybrid team and office team.
Asana project management offers many handy features to optimize team management such as keeping track of daily task complement and a timeline for the whole project, see data in real-time, share feedback, files, and status updates every second. In addition, it helps to boost collaboration among team members and prevent scrambling at the last minute by mapping out priority and emergency tasks.
Asana project management also offers free templates for many kinds of jobs such as marketing, operation, design, engineering, HR, and more. In each job category, you can find well-designed templates such as agency collaboration, creative request, event planning, RFP process, Daily standup meetings, and more. It can be integrated into other softwares including Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Tableau, Zapier, Canva and Vimeo.
5 Alternatives to Asana Project Management
If you find Asana project management might not be your best option for some reasons, there are a range of comparable platforms that also offer many useful features to boost your team productivity.
#1. Hive
Pro: Offer additional features that Asana project management platform might lack such as data import, customizable templates, note taking, and custom forms. You can activate the email integration function to send and receive messages directly from Gmail and Outlook to Hive.
Con: Email integration is somehow unreliable and a lack of version history. Free accounts can be used for maximum 2 participants.
Integration: Google Drive, Google Calendar, Dropbox, Zoom, Microsoft teams, Jira, Outlook, Github, and Slack.
Pricing: Starting with 12 USD per user per month
#2. Scoro
Pro: It is a comprehensive business management software, can help to track invoices and expenses, create budgets for projects and compare these with actual performance. CRM and quoting support with 360 degree of the contact list and Use our full-featured API.
Con: Users have to pay additional fee per feature, and face complicated onboarding, and the platform lack of communication features
Integration: Calendar, MS Exchange, QuickBooks, Xero accounting, Expensify, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Zapier
Price: Starting with 26 USD per user per month
#3. ClickUp
Pro: ClickUp is easy and simple project management with quick-start onboarding and smart built-in slash commands. It allows you to switch between views or use multiple views on the same project. Its Gantt Charts help to estimate your critical path to determine the most crucial project tasks to meet your team deadlines. Spaces in ClickUp are much more flexible.
Con: Space/folder/list/task hierarchy is complex for beginners. It is not allowed to track time on behalf of other members.
Integration: Slack, Hubspot, Make, Gmail, Zoom, Harvest time tracking, Unito, GG Calendar, Dropbox, Loom, Bugsnag, Figma, Front, Zendesk, Github, Miro and Intercom.
Pricing: Starting with 5 USD per user per month
#4. Monday
Pro: Keeping track of communications becomes easier with Monday. The visual boards and the color-coding also are outstanding reminders for users to work on the priority tasks.
Con: It is hard to track time and expenses. The dashboards view is inconsistent with the mobile app. Lack of integration with finance platforms.
Integration: Dropbox, Excel, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Slack, Trell, Zapier, LinkedIn, and Adobe Creative Cloud
Pricing: Starting with 8 USD per user per month
#5. Jira
Pro: Jira offers a cloud-hosted solution to meet your team security needs. It also helps a manager to plan project roadmaps, schedule work, track execution, and produce and analyze it all with agile. Users can customize scrum boards and flexibly adjust Kanban boards with powerful agile views.
Con: Some features are complex and hard to navigate. A lack of built-in timeline to track project progress. Errors might happen when it faces long query load times.
Integration: ClearCase, Subversion, Git, Team Foundation Server, Zephyr, Zendesk, Gliffy, and GitHub
Pricing: Starting with 10 USD per user per month
AhaSlides - Provide 5 Useful Add-ons to Asana Project Management
Using Project Management like Asana or its alternatives is recommended to boost team management and effectiveness. However, for a professional management team, it is not enough to strengthen team bonding, team cohesion or teamwork.
Similar to Asana Project Management, other platforms lack interactive activities so integrating with virtual presentation tools like AhaSlides can offer you competitive advantages. It is important for leaders to combine management and additional activities to satisfy your team members and motivate them to work hard and perform better.
In this section, we suggest 5 best features to boost your team management and team cohesion at the same time.
#1. Icebreakers
Don't forget to add some interesting icebreakers before and during your meetings to engage your team members. It is a good team building activity to improve interpersonal interaction and understanding as well as build trust in the workplace. AhaSlides offers many virtual icebreaker games, templates and tips to help you have fun with your team and prevent your employees from burnout while working on the strict project management.
#2. Interactive presentation
While you and your team are working on the project, it cannot lack presentation. A good presentation is an effective communication tool and prevents misunderstanding and boring. It can be a brief introduction to a new plan, a daily report, a training workshop,... AhaSlides can boost your presentation in terms of interactive, collaborative, real-time data and information and updates with integration with various features like game, survey, polls, quizzes and more.
#3. Interactive surveys and polls
Evaluation and survey are needed to maintain team spirit and tempo. To catch up your employee thinking and avoid conflicts and keep up with deadlines, management team can customize surveys and polls to ask for their satisfaction and opinions. AhaSlides Online poll maker is a fun and incredible feature that can be combined with asana project management easily and directly shared among a variety of participants.
#3. Brainstorming
In terms of project management for a creative team, when your team is stuck up with an old mindset, using brainstorming activity with Word Cloud is not a bad idea to come up with noble ideas and innovation. Brainstorming session with Word Cloud is an organizing and creative technique to record participants' ideas for later analysis.
#4. Spinner Wheel
There is much promising room for using Spinner Wheel as an important supplement to Asana Project Management. When you realize your team is working better than you expect or there are some outstanding employees, it is necessary to give them some rewards and perks. It can be a random gift at a random time of the day. A good random picker software you should try is Spinner Wheel. Participants are free to add their names on the template after spinning the spinner wheel online to get the desired prizes or rewards.
Key Takeaways
Leveraging Asana project management or its alternatives and integrated with supplement tools is a good start to make your team management more effective. Incentives and bonuses should be used too to optimize your team management process.
Try AhaSlides right away to better interact and connect with your team members and support your project management in the most innovative way.
