Cirface CEO Marquis Murray on How To Overcome a Disorganized Asana Workspace
Marquis Murray is a global Asana Solutions Partner and CEO of Cirface, a process improvement consultancy with clients like PayPal, Wealthsimple, and MLB. He also has a YouTube channel where he shares his expertise in all things Asana and workflow management.
We interviewed Marquis to learn more about the work he does with his clients, how optimizing Asana processes can help prevent burnout, and how leaders can measure their Asana workspace’s efficacy.
How did you become such an expert in Asana?
I kind of stumbled into both Asana and workflow optimization. I used to run a marketing agency and had to onboard a lot of team members, and found myself repeating the same things as I trained them. It was really out of frustration that I started to write down the steps I was prescribing over and over again. Eventually, I started using Loom, and would send videos to new team members. As I created more videos, I realized I should probably organize them. The need for a knowledge base became apparent to me.
Over time, I started improving on how we did things, but I needed to document the changes I was making as well. That’s really how I fell into this space.
My marketing agency took a huge hit during the COVID lockdowns, and we were setting up Asana, Slack, and Zoom for lots of teams. I just kind of morphed into an expert in Asana.
What sort of work do you do for your clients?
We’re a process improvement consultancy. We partner with Asana, Unito, Fellow, and HubSpot. Because of my background, we help many of the customers we attract to better understand Asana. We train them in the basics of the tool but we also help them improve how their teams use the tool by showing them opportunities to integrate it with other tools so different teams across their organization can work better together and have better visibility into their projects.
Basically, we come up with a strategy, implement it, and help our clients get more out of their investments in their tool stack.
How does a messy Asana workspace lead to problems like burnout?
A few years ago, I was on a sales call with a prospect who broke down and got really vulnerable with me. This was a director of a Fortune 500 company, from a company where you’d think everyone has it together. But their people are suffering. There’s no standardized way of working and very little support from leadership. Their leaders often don’t even recognize it’s a problem.
Think of that person who’s on their couch on a random Wednesday night who’s dreading going back to work the next day. We want to improve their life at work and at home. And I know what being that person is like.
I suffer from anxiety. I’m medicated and I’ve been in and out of therapy, but there was a time when I was just so overwhelmed by all the work I had and never felt like I could catch up.
When it comes to improving the way we work, everyone’s suffering with this. We’re addressing this global epidemic, and one of our goals is to eliminate workplace burnout by enabling leaders and their teams to optimize the way they work together. It’s not easy, but if we recognize the signs we can take the opportunity to step back, reevaluate, realize something’s broken, then start putting a strategy in place to fix things.
Walk us through using the process improvement framework in Asana
It starts where we sit with customers to understand their current work, what their pain points are, and what they see as opportunities for improvement. From there, we get into designing what their future state will look like by mapping it out visually in Miro so every customer gets a flow chart of their processes.
In those discovery sessions, a lot of customers will see it almost as therapy, because they never get to talk about these processes.
Then we go into the deployment and change management aspects. After all, even if we train them on a new tool and a new process, if it’s not widely adopted and understood, then you can improve all you want to, add all the integration you want, but it’s going to fall flat.
The last step is documentation. We always leave our customers with standard operating procedures that describe what we built, why it matters, and what everyone’s role is in the new process. It’s a step I think a lot of teams miss. There’s that sense of empowerment we give our customers.
Where do teams usually go wrong when setting up their Asana instance?
The most common pitfall I see is people coming to their organization with their experience, being used to doing things a certain way. One might bring Trello, another uses monday.com, and one’s comfortable in Asana. But there’s never a point where they come together and realize this approach doesn’t work.
Some of our customers are still using emails and sticky notes, and they have no visibility into what the rest of their team is doing. They’ve set up digital and physical silos, they’re struggling to meet deadlines, and there’s duplication of work. There’s no central point for the status of a project and they have no reporting at all because no one knows what metrics they should be tracking and if they’re even accurate.
Leadership puts more on them, they’re overworked, and they have no way to prove it.
What are some examples of impactful outcomes from successfully implementing integrations?
We worked with a large multinational brand that used both Salesforce and Asana. Their entire marketing and branding organization is in Asana, while their sales and partnerships team is in Salesforce. We were able to create a live two-way sync between the teams to improve visibility on their opportunities as they move through the pipeline. Marketing needs to support sales at various stages and so we’re able to bring together teams that are not used to working in each other’s tools.
It’s improved handoffs, improved how teams work together, and improved delivery time for a lot of teams. They’re not having to spend hours backtracking or trying to find information across disparate tools.
How can someone get buy-in when trying to pitch integrations to their team?
When I’m on sales calls, I’m rarely speaking with the decision maker. I’m speaking to frustrated, disgruntled individual contributors or team leaders who want to improve how things are. My advice to them is to start small. In those conversations, I’m trying to help them find a way to prove the validity of the improvements they’re trying to make by changing little things.
If we can change this one little thing and make a case for improving how we work to leadership or another team, whether it’s implementing a new tool or plugging in something like Unito, that’s often a good place to start.
Do something really small, plug it in, test it out, record it, put it in a pitch deck, and make your case that way.
What are some metrics teams can use to see the results of optimizing their Asana workspace?
Aside from status updates, and outstanding tasks, teams and leadership want to know how much time they’ve saved. How much time did we save with this new process? How many hours of meetings did we save?
I also look at metrics like team happiness. Are our customers content? Happy? Frustrated? Eliminating burnout is one of our things, so if we can reduce the amount of stress people feel, that speaks to our mission.
What’s your vision for the future of Asana?
Asana already has AI that summarizes tasks, gives task statuses, and the like. I think what we’re missing is sentiment-related information. Like, if someone keeps pushing a task back, getting some insights into why, or what’s going on. Based on the tone of a task or comments, are collaborators stressed or approaching burnout? Maybe Asana can then send a notification to their manager to have a one-on-one or a check-in. Or maybe it could recommend a book or other mental health resources through a sub-task.
I think an evolution of the tool would be like yeah, work’s important, but the people and their state of mind is important as well. If we have the information there and we’re willing to look into it and dissect it a little bit more.
Want to see how integrations can bring teams together?
Check out Marquis's video guide comparing Asana's native Jira integration and Unito's integration.
Thank you for sharing your insights with us Marquis!
This interview was edited for length and clarity.