Asana is a new, free software designed to assist small businesses with projects.  If you are in a situation where you have multiple employees working on a project, then Asana is an ideal project management workflow tool.

What is Asana?

According to the company blog:

Asana is a modern web application that keeps teams in sync, a shared task list where everyone can capture, organize, track, and communicate what they are working on in service of their common goal. Rather than trying to stay organized through the tedious grind of emails and meetings, teams using Asana can move faster and do more — or even take on bigger and more interesting goals.

Asana re-imagines the way we work together by putting the fundamental unit of productivity – the task – at the center. Breaking down ambitious goals into small pieces, assigning ownership of those tasks, and tracking them to completion is how things get built, from software to skyscrapers. With Asana, you can:

• – capture everything your team is planning and doing in one place. When tasks and the conversations about them are collected together, instead of spread around emails, documents, whiteboards, and notebooks, they become the shared, trusted, collective memory for your organization.
• – keep your team in sync on the priorities, and what everyone is working on. When you have a single shared view of a project’s priorities, along with an accurate view into what each person is working on and when, everyone on the team knows exactly what matters, and what work remains between here and the goal.
• – get the right information at the right time. Follow tasks, and you’ll receive emails as their status evolves. Search, and you’ll see the full activity feed of all the discussions and changes to a task over its history. Now, it’s easy to stay on top of the details — without asking people to forward you a bunch of email threads.

We at Black Box Social Media have used Asana and like it.  Here are some of the reasons that I think other businesses will enjoy as well:

• Multiple people can use at once
• Can assign jobs to individual people with due dates
• Can include files in the notes
• The software revolves around the project
• Has by team member summaries
• Helpful tutorials

Who Is Behind Asana?

According to Mashable:  While still at Facebook, Asana co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein developed a prototype task manager that helps groups cut down on email chains and meetings. After watching the prototype take off within Facebook, they left the giant social network that Moskovitz helped found and continued developing what would become Asana. Now they’re introducing that collaboration tool to the world by opening it to the public for the first time.  Asana, which has been in private beta for about a year, is a free, single-shared task list for groups. It helps everybody on a team keep track of what they and others are working on without what the startup has termed “work about work,” or unnecessary logistical conversations.  http://mashable.com/2011/11/02/asana/

How Does Asana Work?

Asana is very simple to use.  To best demonstrate, watch this video:

Asana Conclusion

In summary, Asana is a very useful tool and resource for small businesses.  Investing in software or trying to understand other project management tools can be very difficult.  This took us about 5 minutes to create our first Asana project and assign tasks.  Many businesses will benefit from Asana.