Coupa scales to support customers with Asana

Highlights

Challenge

• Before Asana, there was no centralized workspace for tracking and managing initiatives across the Value Services organization. 

• Different teams used a variety of tools and spreadsheets, which dispersed work and made it difficult for executives to see progress at a high level.

• The PMO needed a formal intake process to help them organize and prioritize requests in an aligned and objective manner.

Solution

• Leadership established a PMO to develop solutions and chose Asana to provide a strong foundation for growth.

• They selected the platform to provide an efficient way to report on project status across teams, gain clarity on who’s doing what by when, and prevent work from falling through the cracks.

• The PMO championed the platform and slowly expanded Asana to other teams. 

• Asana offered a single path to manage requests, an overhead view of work in flight, and a way to spot and consolidate duplicate work.

Outcomes

•  +658% time saved in 3 years: Coupa introduced a PMO in 2020 with Asana. By 2023, they saved 135 workdays per year by eliminating silos and uniting work across teams.

• Improved visibility for leadership: Using Asana, Coupa’s PMO created an organizational roadmap for upcoming projects and consolidated active projects into a portfolio to easily showcase progress against goals

• Objective project prioritization: The establishment of a numerical ranking system via an Asana intake form helped the PMO org prioritize new projects and make good decisions for the business.

Asana gives executive leadership visibility into our organization’s roadmap and performance in one place.”

How Asana helps Coupa work smarter

Showing the organization what’s possible with a PMO and Asana

Today, upcoming and in-flight Value Services initiatives are tracked in Asana, helping customers reach their business goals from Coupa implementation to adoption and beyond. Projects include implementing new tools like a CMS, a learning management system, and a client communication platform for account managers.           

Now Value Services teams can request project and program management support from the PMO via an end-to-end system in Asana that takes projects from request to roadmap to delivery.

Standardized requests for better prioritization

Streamlined work intake helps teams move faster

Before Asana, there was no standardized process for tracking and managing initiatives across the Value Services organization. The org needed a formal intake process to help them organize and prioritize requests in an aligned and objective manner.

Now, for the PMO to consider a request for support, a Value Services team must submit their initiative via an Asana form that takes the project through a priority scoring system. This system has facilitated faster and more objective decision-making about how to allocate resources. The Asana form also helps the PMO team collect important information about a project upfront so they can kick off work faster. 

Seamless project prioritization

• The team collects all the information they need to kick off requests with an Asana intake form, which requires details like business use case, executive sponsors, teams involved, timing, and whether technical support is required. 

• The form also asks submitters to map the initiative to at least one of three organizational goals, ensuring new work aligns to business priorities.

• The PMO team uses form responses to create an overall priority number that helps rank the initiative against others.

• When a form is submitted, it creates a corresponding task that goes into a Project Intake board in Asana, where the PMO team reviews the request and its priority ranking.

We’ve made a big shift in the way we handle requests for PMO. We worked prioritization scoring into our Asana intake form. We’ve removed subjectivity from the prioritization process and streamlined the highest impact work into our organizational roadmap.”

Enhanced roadmap alignment and execution

Improved visibility helps leaders plan upcoming work

The Value Services Roadmap captures and tracks all upcoming and in-flight work, giving leadership a view into what’s coming up for the organization. In this pre-kickoff stage, the team can align all stakeholders, gather project requirements, and agree on milestones.

Efficient project roadmapping

Leaders can see every upcoming initiative, represented by a task in the Value Services Roadmap project.

• Custom fields make it easy to sort, filter, and report on work. These fields are automatically populated by the original form, and include prioritization level, approval status, delivery quarter, and the strategic goal it maps to.

• For initiatives that require support from the Technical Services PMO team, an Asana subtask is automatically assigned to the Technical Services team for approval–ensuring cross-functional alignment of roadmap priorities and visibility across both PMO organizations.

• When work begins, the PMO automatically converts the Asana task into an Asana project. This maintains continuity by preserving historical information from the original form submission.

The biggest change I’ve seen with Asana is that we don’t work in silos and there’s a lot more visibility. Everyone has shifted from ‘what’s best for my team?’ to ‘what’s best for the company?'”

Streamlined project planning and real-time progress tracking

Real-time reporting keeps work on track

Coupa’s PMO needed an efficient way to report on project status across teams, gain clarity on who’s doing what by when, and prevent work from falling through the cracks.

Dynamic project and progress tracking

• New projects are auto-added to the PMO team’s “In-flight” portfolio in Asana, which shows all active projects at a glance. It’s easy to see their due dates, status, which Value Services teams are affected, and more.

• Teams can collaborate and track work in the Asana project, and in-depth status updates for each project are posted biweekly.

• The PMO team created a consistent template for these updates, including the goal, what’s been accomplished in the last two weeks, roadblocks that need attention, and next steps.

• For consistent reporting of key organizational performance metrics, the team built a dashboard that tracks work across the in-flight portfolio, such as the number of active projects by team, the number of projects by status category, and the percentage of projects delivered on time.

• Completed projects are moved to a “completed projects” portfolio in Asana.

Using Asana for our project intake and prioritization process, organizational roadmap, and in-flight project tracking has been game-changing. We can take projects from request to delivery quickly and scale at pace with our business. ”

Since establishing the PMO with Asana as its infrastructure, it’s estimated that Coupa’s Value Services organization has increased their total time savings +658% from 2020 to 2023. The PMO helps its teams scale and gives executives visibility into initiatives across the organization, through a prioritized roadmap and standardized progress reports. Moving processes to Asana has streamlined collaboration between the PMO and the teams they work with, helping save approximately 135 workdays per year that was once spent on work, and is now focused on driving further impact. 

The PMO will continue showcasing the value of Asana and project management to teams across Coupa, helping them drive more impact as the company works toward its vision of making every business dollar spent more effective, equitable, and sustainable.