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Business leaders agree that after significant economic contraction last year, 2021 brings enough opportunity for expansion. But companies continue to face operational challenges. Efficiency is key for making them more resilient, competitive, and profitable. Organizations are busy looking for solutions, but their biggest problem is the one they do not recognize. To continue providing customers high-quality products and services, teams need to improve their processes with the help of lean principles and task management software like KanbanFlow and Asana.
Importance of efficient task management
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An efficient way to manage team tasks is to make sure that every task delivers value to the end user. Any task that does not deliver value is unnecessary and a waste of time and resources. Visual
task management software helps increase visibility in projects and processes. This also increases the efficiency of your team for better performance and greater output. This KanbanFlow vs. Asana article compares similar features and unique approaches to help you choose the right task management solution for your team.
Benefits of lean task management
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A necessary step in improving organizational efficiency is identifying what is valuable to the customer and checking that all team tasks and activities contribute to those values. Lean task management provides several benefits, including:
- Greater work visibility – persons responsible, priorities, progress, and risks
- Reduced stress – greater visibility provides team members a better understanding
- Improved project control – better understanding of the situation provides options
- Better decisions – with more options and data, teams can make better decisions
- Quality products/services – informed decisions help teams meet their goals of delivering the right products or services that customers find valuable
Read also:
Improve Organizational Communication with Project Management Software
The KanbanFlow approach
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KanbanFlow is a lean project management software that enables individuals and teams to boost their productivity. The Kanban board-based solution easily provides the view of the overall work situation so team members can communicate and collaborate seamlessly. It helps teams get a better workflow where they can focus on completing tasks rather than starting new ones. The software includes features such as WIP limits, subtasks, filters, recurring tasks, and swimlanes. It has a built-in time management tool, numerous reports, and a native iOS app for staying connected remotely.
Kanban board
KanbanFlow provides you a Kanban board where you can customize your workflow by dividing the project or process into columns. You can further customize the columns to fit your team workflow while instantly giving you an overview of your team’s work situation. Set WIP limits so you can work on finishing tasks first before starting new ones. Subtasks help you divide further your tasks into checklists that you can easily track. Add horizontal swimlanes so you can group the overall work into teams, products, or business areas for better work tracking. Other features include filters by user, label, color, or due date, recurring tasks created automatically, relations between tasks, file attachments, search, and collapsible columns.
Time tracking
KanbanFlow includes a built-in time tracking tool where you can track work in two ways. Use the
Pomodoro technique that gives you sets of 25 minute intervals and a short break, or use a regular stopwatch. Team members can also log their time manually. Pomodoro statistic reports will show what interruptions are causing loss of focus. A time spent report is also available that can be further customized with filtering and grouping.
Analytics & reporting
Reports include cumulative flow diagrams that can help teams analyze workflow and identify bottlenecks. The cycle and lead time reports show the time it takes for tasks to move along columns. KanbanFlow’s burndown chart show how many tasks remain and can help track progress to predict when your team can complete all the work. The throughput chart can help you measure performance and how much value your team produces. Other tools include a calendar view, dashboard for multiple boards on a single page, forecasting, time estimate, task count, and board and task history.
The Asana approach
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Asana is an online project management software that lets you organize your teams and tasks of all sizes. It is an intuitive solution with multiple views to help teams deliver high-quality products from initiatives to execution. The software provides multiple views of work, customizable fields for improved tracking, and task automation for increased efficiency. It has enterprise-grade tools and features such as goal-setting, portfolio, workload, and request forms. Native mobile apps for iOS and Android are available.
Kanban boards
Asana has Kanban boards that allow your team to focus on the right tasks. You can customize each stage of work to see important tasks and activities as well as identify causes of problems. It is an efficient and visual way to map projects and workflows using columns for stages and cards for tasks. Teams can use it for Scrum and other agile practices. Together with other tools, you can use it to manage work requests and automatically assign to team members. Manage custom workflows by creating the stages where tasks move from one stage to the next.
Timeline
Asana provides an interactive timeline where teams can easily see tasks, durations, due dates, and dependencies like a Gantt chart. From your task list, switch to timeline view and improve your project plan with a clear view of how tasks and deadlines connect. A drag-and-drop interface lets any user make adjustments when change in the plan occurs. Import your spreadsheet and quickly create a timeline that provides a better view to help you stay on track.
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Asana Time Tracking
Views and reporting
Team members can quickly organize and prioritize tasks assigned to them with My Tasks. For more data, Asana also has a Workload view for showing the load of every team member across projects. The Portfolios view allows managers to monitor the status of all projects in realtime. A dashboard lets you customize charts to spot potential problems and bottlenecks. It also has a calendar view, a files view for finding project files quickly, and a teammate view that shows all tasks assigned to them.
Ready to decide on KanbanFlow vs. Asana?
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KanbanFlow and Asana are visual and collaborative project management tools that can help teams improve their efficiency. Both solutions offer free plans with basic features and premium plans with advanced tools.
KanbanFlow is ideal for SMBs looking for a Kanban-based task management solution with included time tracking tools and reporting.
Asana is an easy-to-use
project management software with enterprise-grade features, admin controls, and integration to many popular applications for a more comprehensive
workflow management.
