Anyone who has worked in a large organization knows that all too often the most time-consuming part of your job isn’t your actual work. It’s communicating and coordinating 100 moving parts between 10 different departments. Approvals, hand-offs, status reports – all of this “work about work” dominates your day and stops you from focusing on critical tasks.
According to the Anatomy of Work Report, U.S. workers spend 61% of their time on “work about work” and believe they could save 1 day each week if processes were improved.
AT&T is no different. With over 500k employees and hundreds of thousands of projects, the telecom giant saw the need for increased productivity & efficiency. They turned to Asana for better project workflows, automation, and reporting.
Despite the best intentions the company had several challenges including:
Multiple separate instances of Asana running for production teams all over the world
Structure to their Asana workflows and automation from the ground-up
Various tool integration including Quickbase, Jira and more
Brand new Dashboard with customized reports with Power BI
They enlisted STAND 8 to overhaul their Asana instances, cut down the noise, and increase productivity.
With the roadmap defined, STAND 8 migrated over multiple Asana instances to one enterprise instance. This was a major challenge. Prior internal attempts to update the software presented more risk than reward. To add to the complexity, Asana had to integrate with another productivity tool, QuickBase, because some teams were still relying on it to run projects. STAND 8 migrated to Asana Enterprise, integrated with QuickBase, and imported 1000+ existing projects into the tool. Once the projects were imported into Asana, STAND 8 SME’s coached AT&T employees on Asana’s functionality. STAND 8 then created workflow templates that streamline communication and keep employees focused. Using a global intake form, STAND 8 created workflows for Asana to automate key tasks for new employees and new projects.
These productivity gains compound over time as you can re-use similar workflows on different projects. Instead of starting with a project kick-off where things must be defined from scratch, you can use workflow templates and get started quickly. Perhaps the most critical need for AT&T is for project reporting. Executives needed a better way to see all their projects, their assigned resources, and any potential risks. To meet this need STAND 8 integrated Asana with AT&T’s existing Power BI infrastructure. This allowed managers to push a button and pull data straight into Power BI dashboards. At any point in time, executives can see the allocation of their resources and which projects need support.
Thanks to STAND 8’s partnership and expertise, AT&T now has a robust Asana environment capable of managing & tracking hundreds of projects.
Improved workflows mean projects get started more quickly and move more efficiently. They can “rinse and repeat” workflows across projects and communication noise is greatly reduced.
Employees now have less “work about work”. They love Asana’s simplified task view across projects, and they can stay focused on the matter at hand.
With custom Power BI integrations with built out reports and dashboards, PM’s now have a better way to track progress, distribute resources, and report up to executives.
Given these advantages, it’s no wonder that the CEO designated Asana as the company's “Tool of Choice” moving forward.
