KENDO is scaling effectively—and working faster—with Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Employees managed their work in different tools, which made it nearly impossible to have visibility into what work was happening. This left teams siloed and leaders in the dark.

• KENDO is in a period of rapid growth, and managing work in emails and spreadsheets couldn’t scale with them.

• A lack of unified processes meant disconnected workflows with unclear deadlines that caused a lack of accountability and important work to be missed.

Solution

• KENDO implemented Asana as a central source of truth where employees, across departments and role levels, have visibility into what work is happening and when. With rapid growth comes even more work—this centralized visibility has allowed them to prioritize the most crucial initiatives first to grow their brands.

• Teams are able to streamline processes, from building out marketing calendars to automating IT requests into backlogs, to do their most important work faster. 

• Leaders are able to quickly make decisions that unblock work and drive accountability across teams because they have visibility into updates and approval requests.

Outcomes

• 87 workdays saved: Just by using Asana, KENDO has saved an estimated three months of time previously spent coordinating work annually.

• 58% more time saved: By expanding the number of employees who use Asana to manage their work, KENDO has increased the amount of time they’re saving by 58% in just one year.

• Building stronger brands: With curated Asana projects, marketing teams have full visibility into what’s happening where, so they can ensure consistent messaging, identify opportunities to increase campaign impact, and better connect with customers.

To hit our ambitious growth target, we need to move fast. But we can’t do it without clear processes that remove as many blockers as possible. I'm a strong believer that implementing processes, like the ones we’ve built in Asana, will help us drive success.”

Connecting directly with customers through coordinated digital activations

Aligning content and messaging across teams and channels is crucial, especially for large-scale digital activations like launching new products and promotional campaigns. 

By aligning all activations across their website, performance marketing, and customer relationship management system through asynchronous work in Asana, the digital team can now identify more opportunities to collaborate and streamline work across teams, enhancing their impact. 

Enhanced (and advanced) planning 

• In the past, teams used individual, static spreadsheets for planning and setting timelines. Work was happening in isolation, which slowed them down and made it harder to ensure everything was getting done. With Asana, the digital team has designed a collaborative, connected planning process they use with all their cross-functional partners.

• Now, they can not only track tasks and milestones for each activation, but also templatize their process—so nothing is missed. 

Improved project visibility and accountability

• The digital team uses Asana as a "digital calendar" where they can view, track, and support all digital activations happening across brands. This gives them a single, comprehensive calendar that connects every team’s individual calendar in one, unified space, so everyone knows what work is happening when.

• This visibility into each other's work allows them to collaborate more effectively, without the need for extra meetings. As a result, they can maximize reach across channels, driving a more consistent and powerful consumer experience that powers digital sales.

We’re now able to align our content and messaging across channels to launch more impactful digital activations thanks to our streamlined workflows and “digital calendar” in Asana.”

More accountability for smoother marketing  workflows

Previously, the marketing team's workflow was fragmented, relying heavily on emails and checklists for project management. It was difficult to drive accountability and get a holistic view of plans and progress because everyone focused on their individual tasks.

Asana replaced the disjointed system with a unified, action-oriented platform. Now, they can all work in one place to execute social media activations, influencer gifting, campaigns, and experiential marketing.

A central source of truth

• Asana centralized communication about projects, streamlining the approval process and surfacing work that previously got lost in the shuffle.

• The team can see the full scope of work happening in real-time. This visibility has eliminated the confusion and inefficiency of the old system, and templates ensure a consistent process is followed each time with clear objectives and due dates.

• Because they can communicate, work, and see all details in one place, the team can easily identify and prioritize essential tasks, increasing overall efficiency and accountability.

I’ve been asking myself, how do we work? Faster and smarter, or harder? With a system like Asana, we can understand where to streamline our work and what steps we can take to truly maximize our impact. This allows us to focus on the work that matters—driving brand awareness and revenue.”

Properly scoped IT projects start with getting the right details, every time

Previously, the IT team was trapped in an ongoing feedback loop. The company was growing rapidly, and without the right processes in place, they were missing critical information to scope requests and projects often got stuck in the queue.

With Asana, the IT team now has a structured approach to gather requests, prioritize them, assign deadlines, and close the loop. 

Streamlined requests for more impactful workflows 

• The IT team struggled to organize and prioritize work effectively. Now, they use an Asana form for IT requests, which automatically turns into a task with custom fields to capture and tag the information. A project manager reviews and scopes each project, with leaders signing off before moving into production, ensuring a clear start and end date for each project.

• By curating their custom fields to ensure they have exact information they need from the outset, they’ve reduced unnecessary back-and-forth with stakeholders to complete requests.

• This streamlined process allows the IT team to manage up to 40 projects at once.

Complete accessibility

• Senior leaders were often in the dark about what work their teams were requesting, how it was progressing, and necessary details to help the IT team prioritize. Now, request tasks can be added to multiple projects so anyone—including leadership—can access status updates or relevant information quickly and easily.

• With this improved visibility into the process, the IT team can see every request, get the information they need to accurately scope it, and receive leadership feedback on what to prioritize based on business needs and available resources. Now, they have shorter action-oriented meetings for more effective prioritization, ending with fully scoped projects.

Before we started using Asana, leaders were too often left in the dark about projects. Now, we’re getting more commitment from the business upfront because they have a birds-eye-view of all requests across the company. It’s helping us to scope resource bandwidth and more efficiently tackle large-scale, complex projects.”

A solution that grows with the team

KENDO is growing, and they need a solution that will grow with them. That’s why they’re using Asana to systematize processes, automate steps, and streamline their work. With some of the most well-known and exciting brands under their label, KENDO teams can now focus on driving customer purchases and increasing company revenue with targeted, well-defined clarity across the organization.