Asana boosts goal tracking, resource management, and security

Work management platform Asana on Wednesday announced a suite of new features and product integrations designed to help enterprises maximize resources and improve strategic planning and security.

The new capabilities include the launch of a new, enterprise-grade version of the company’s Goals application and new security features to give organizations the tools to audit information and flag vulnerabilities, allowing enterprises to remain compliant within highly regulated industries such as healthcare.

Enterprise leaders are struggling to make sure that they can act more deftly in the face of changing market conditions, said Saket Srivastava, CIO at Asana, citing a McKinsey report produced in 2021, which found that only 11% of organizations are confident their current business models will be viable through 2023.

“The question is, how can enterprise leaders act more nimbly and in a more agile way wherein they’re able to align their priorities and shift their teams to meet company objectives. Those are some of the challenges that larger enterprises are navigating,” he said.

Leveling up reporting, workflows, and security

Built on Asana’s Work Graph, the new upgrade will offer enterprise customers access to advanced reporting and dashboards for Goals, including the ability for executives to have a bird’s eye view into the status of their organization’s goals, which projects and portfolios are driving goal progress, impact on business outcomes, and roadblocks.

Goals can be connected to mission-critical tools, allowing ongoing goal progress to be automatically updated. Goal snapshots allow leaders to surface key goal information at a glance for leaders, while goal status can be communicated across teams and entire organizations through reports and dashboards.

Asana is also helping teams to better leverage data to aid strategic planning. A new native time-tracking feature will allow leaders to better manage timelines by estimating how long projects and tasks will take, ensuring they can easily pivot around new priorities and remain informed about resource allocation and team workloads.

“Our product is purpose built to support the end-to-end goals management process, from creating strategic goals and advanced planning,” Srivastava said. “It then helps leaders take those goals through into the execution phase and connect with company-level strategic objectives across multiple teams and the organization.”

Asana is also increasing cross-functional efficiencies by connecting tech stacks to its software. By expanding the ability for customers to connect tools at every stage of a workflow, cross-functional teams can now streamline work and stay up to date on progress by automatically turning updates within external apps into trackable tasks in Asana.

Rule integrations with Twilio, PagerDuty, Gmail, and others will help customers aggregate information across several tools to stay connected and remove bottlenecks.

According to Wayne Kurtzman, IDC vice president for collaboration and communities, Asana is building on its collaborative work management data by increasing the value of Asana content to all members of the enterprise.

“The theme is that Asana is effectively increasing the value of the elements of workflow into goals that streamline work and analytics across the user base — which could now reach across the enterprise,” Kurtzman said, adding that this becomes more vital as flexible work patterns require a new era of agility, while improving the metrics and visibility around the value of work.

“Asana moves closer to that goal with these releases,” he said.

Finally, Asana’s new security features include integrations with software from data loss prevention (DLP) company Nightfall, legal tech firm Hanzo, and security and compliance firm Theta Lake.

Asana to launch new data centers

Asana is also launching additional global data centers in Australia and Japan to help enterprises secure customer data and meet compliance standards.

The advanced goals reporting, dashboards, and sharing functionality; goals integration with Salesforce; new rules integrations; and time tracking will all be available to both Asana Enterprise and Business customers. 

The new security features including DLP, eDiscovery, archiving, mobile app admin controls, and HIPAA compliance will only be available to Enterprise plan customers, as will Asana’s new data centers in Australia and Japan.