Building Asana Kanban Boards: 4 Easy Steps

In this modern era, as IT services have become increasingly prevalent, organizations are encountering plenty of challenges in managing incoming projects. Major IT firms are facing difficulties in optimizing their workflow. In such scenarios, Asana comes to the rescue. Asana is one of the many Project Management Systems available that manages the complete project workflow in one place. It can help you replace the slew of E-Mails, spreadsheets, and sticky notes that clutter your desk with a far more comprehensive solution. 

One of the popular views in Asana is the Kanban View. Asana Kanban View is similar to a board with cards arranged into columns, where cards represent your projects or opportunities and columns represent the stages you must go through to complete the project or opportunity. Moreover, it can be used to keep track of day-to-day work as well as track the project’s overarching goals and progress.

This article will walk you through the process of building Asana Kanban Boards from scratch. It will also provide you with a brief introduction to Asana and Asana Kanban Boards. You will also get to know about the advantages and limitations of the Asana Kanban Boards in further sections. Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Introduction to Asana
• Key Features of Asana
  • Customizable Dashboards
  • Unique Views
  • Communication Portal
  • Integrations
• Introduction to Asana Kanban Boards
• Key Features of Asana Kanban Boards
  • Measuring Progress
  • Improving Collaboration
  • Setting and Meeting Deadlines
  • Creating Product Roadmaps
• Steps to Build your Asana Kanban Boards
  • Step 1: Create a New Project
  • Step 2: Create Sections in the Kanban Boards
  • Step 3: Add Tasks in the Kanban Boards
  • Step 4: Create Additional Kanban Boards if Necessary
• Advantages of Asana Kanban Boards
• Limitations of Asana Kanban Boards
• Conclusion

Prerequisites

You will have a much easier time understanding the ways for building Asana Kanban Boards if you have gone through the following aspects:

• An active Asana account.
• Working knowledge of Project Management Tools.
• Working knowledge of Kanban would be an added advantage.

Introduction to Asana

Asana is a popular Cloud-Based Project Management Software used by enterprises of all sizes. It is a great way to keep track of even the largest and most complicated projects with ease. On top of that, it serves as a platform for Task Management, Collaboration, Document Management, Workflow Management, Project Portfolio Management, and many more. 

Asana offers a wide range of ways to visualize your task progress, such as Lists, Calendars, Kanban Boards, and Gantt Charts. Furthermore, it supports over 100 integrations, allowing you to save time switching between all of the different applications you use. Overall, Asana is an effective Project Management tool, and many teams find that utilizing it increases their productivity.

Key Features of Asana

Asana is rapidly acquiring market share because of its unique features that make it different from its competitors. Let’s look at some of the key features of Asana that make it a popular choice among consumers.

• Customizable Dashboards
• Unique Views
• Communication Portal
• Integrations

1) Customizable Dashboards

Asana provides fully Customizable Dashboards that show the status of each participant and tracks the progress of each task separately. Moreover, tracking Leads, Customer Queries, and Job Applications can all be tracked using the Dashboard. The Dashboard can also be utilized for group discussions in Asana.

2) Unique Views

Asana is one of the best choices you can make when it comes to Views. Asana features a prioritization list with automated notifications, that can help you to prioritize specific tasks. Also, Asana provides a powerful search filter that can be used to locate the required files. One of the popular views is the Asana Kanban View.

3) Communication Portal

Asana provides a smart inbox, which allows you to transfer all of your workplace communications without the need for third-party apps or services. Moreover, it allows users to communicate one-on-one or in groups, and share files from their local devices or Google/Dropbox/Box accounts.

4) Integrations

In terms of the number of integrations, Asana outperforms most other Project Management platforms. Asana supports over 100 integrations, including Dropbox, Slack, GitHub, and Mailchimp.

To know more about Asana, visit this link.

Introduction to Asana Kanban Boards

Asana Kanban is a framework for visualizing project progress. For easy understanding, the Asana Kanban Boards can be visualized as a collection of sticky notes arranged in columns on a wall. A distinct task would be represented by each sticky note. The sticky notes will be moved from column to column to illustrate how close the work is to completion. Columns such as “Todo”, “In Progress”, and “Complete” could appear on the most basic Kanban Boards.

The Asana Kanban Boards allow everyone in the organization to share their thoughts. It also allows team members to work on projects in their own time and avoid awkward face-to-face meetings. Thus, Asana Kanban’s use of cards and boards gives team members a voice in attempting to ignite the change.

Key Features of Asana Kanban Boards

Asana Kanban Boards are an excellent way to divide large, complex projects into manageable, discrete tasks to optimize your workflow. Some of the key features of the Asana Kanban Boards include:

• Measuring Progress
• Improving Collaboration
• Setting and Meeting Deadlines
• Creating Product Roadmaps

1) Measuring Progress

The Kanban Boards in Asana are designed in such a way that it’s simple to monitor how a project is progressing. Within the columns in the Asana Kanban View, tasks move from left to right, indicating effective progress and completion of tasks. Moreover, the teams can also see any bottlenecks that may exist in the Asana Kanban View.

2) Improving Collaboration

Asana Kanban Boards allow team members to access all messages and comments on tasks for the project using the cards on the Asana Kanban Views. All communication takes place on the Asana Kanban Views, rather than via lengthy email communications. Thus, helping in improving the Collaboration among the teams.

3) Setting and Meeting Deadlines

The Asana Kanban Boards allow teams to specify explicit deadlines for finishing tasks. Thus, helping team members to identify whether someone is lagging by establishing clear deadlines to tasks in the Asana Kanban View. Furthermore, the Asana Kanban View makes it easier to focus on the projects that have upcoming deadlines for a team that does well with starting work but struggles to finish them.

4) Creating Product Roadmaps

Product Roadmaps can be easily created with Asana Kanban Boards. Team members may effectively collaborate on product goals, actions required to complete the product, and the priority of each stage by using the roadmaps in the Asana Kanban Views.

To know more about the Asana Kanban Boards, visit this link. 

Steps to Build your Asana Kanban Boards

Kanban Boards can be created using a whiteboard and sticky notes, or a spreadsheet and some formatting, but the easiest way to view Kanban Boards are with a Project Management tool like Asana. You can follow the below-mentioned steps to create your first Asana Kanban Boards:

• Step 1: Create a New Project
• Step 2: Create Sections in the Kanban Boards
• Step 3: Add Tasks in the Kanban Boards
• Step 4: Create Additional Kanban Boards if Necessary

Step 1: Create a New Project 

To create a new project, you can follow the below-mentioned procedure: 

• Click the orange “+” icon in the top bar and choose “Project” as shown by the image below. 

• A pop-up window will appear, Click on the + Blank Project as shown by the image below.

• After that, you’ll be presented with a pop-up window where you may fill in the details of your project. Choose Board as your project layout from the Default view menu. Then, click on Create project from the drop-down menu as shown below.

Step 2: Create Sections in the Kanban Boards

To create Sections in the Kanban Boards, click on the +Add section. A new section will emerge as soon as you name it in the header field. Now, you can create sections in the Asana Kanban View as categories to collect similar tasks or as phases to track a specific workflow, such as “Ready”, “In Progress”, and “Complete” as shown by the below image.

Step 3: Add Tasks in the Kanban Boards

Using the “+” button next to the section name, you can add tasks to your sections. For more information, you can expand tasks within a section by clicking on them as shown by the below image.

Step 4: Create Additional Kanban Boards if Necessary

When a board becomes overly cluttered with cards, you can establish a new Asana Kanban View. Some of the current tasks can be split up, and some cards can be moved to the new view. Then, to design the board layout, repeat the steps outlined earlier.

With this, you have successfully created your Asana Kanban Boards and now you can use them to optimize your project workflows.

Advantages of Asana Kanban Boards

Asana Kanban Boards is a great, flexible tool that may assist organizations in balancing work and optimizing the workflow. Some of the advantages of the Asana Kanban Boards include:

1) Flexibility

Asana Kanban Boards are highly Flexible. Teams can become more adaptable and dynamic over time because the Kanban framework is built on a continuous improvement process. Moreover, there are no defined durations for phases, and priorities are regularly reviewed depending on new information.

2) Focus on Continuous Delivery

Teams have several opportunities to synchronize future iterations with changing business needs by providing small portions of a project to the customer continuously. Also, teams can ensure that they are offering exactly what the consumer wants in this manner.

3) Improves the Clarity of Work among Team Members

It can be difficult to gain visibility into what your team is working on if they are all working remotely. Thus, by centralizing the work, Kanban Boards can assist you and your team in obtaining insights into who’s working on what.

4) Responsive 

The Kanban Boards are highly Responsive and do not cause lags or delays. As the tasks are continuously shifted between the columns of the Kanban cards, any limiting constraints that may be holding back the total production are automatically highlighted and can be addressed as soon as feasible by shifting and switching resources from other tasks.

Limitations of Asana Kanban Boards

For every team, Kanban isn’t the right framework. A few of the limitations of the Asana Kanban Boards include:

1. The prediction of particular deadlines for task or activity completion becomes challenging as tasks are frequently changed across the columns of the Asana Kanban View.

2. Because each task card takes up so much visible space, if you have too many items in flight at once, your Asana Kanban View can rapidly become cluttered and confusing.

3. Kanban does not work well in dynamic environments. Because a Kanban system assumes stable and consistent planning, it may be unsuccessful in businesses where the operations are not static.

Conclusion

Overall, Asana Kanban Boards are an excellent way to divide large, complex projects into manageable, discrete tasks. It allows the team to monitor the actions at any time to get a sense of where the project stands. These boards can be used to create product roadmaps as well. However, when the team uses Asana Kanban Boards as a Project Management tool to handle multiple moving pieces at the same time, they shine. 

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Share your experience of building Asana Kanban Boards in the comments section below!