[Assam] [assam] From a Facebook Founder Comes a way to Sreamline Workflow

[bhuban.baruah]

New York Times (May 21. 2012)

>From a Facebook Founder Comes a Way to Streamline Work Flow
May 21, 2012 1:02  By QUENTIN HARDY / The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook's success has spawned a multimillion-dollar 
boom in social networking. There are networks for photo-sharers, for 
children and for workers inside companies. Yammer and Jive, for 
instance, promise to energize employees and increase their productivity 
by enabling fast information sharing.

Dustin Moskovitz thinks this is a bad idea that won't fly. "The first 
time I looked at Yammer, I thought I was on Facebook," he said. "Work 
is not a social network, with serendipitous communications and photo 
collections. Work is about managing tasks, and responding to things 
quickly."

Mr. Moskovitz does know a little bit about running the operations of a 
fast-growing company. He helped found Facebook along with Mark 
Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes while at Harvard in 2004. 
His job was to make sure the computers straining to run Facebook's 
expanding network never went down.

After leaving Facebook in 2008 with enough equity to make him one of 
the world's youngest billionaires, Mr. Moskovitz, now 27, works on his 
own version of company management software for the networked age. He 
calls it Asana.

Asana is task-based software, a shared to-do list for the company. Work 
is assigned and completed by a potentially unending set of teams 
created on the fly. Asana is a Sanskrit word meaning "easeful posture." 
Yoga practitioners think of it in terms of complex poses done 
effortlessly. "You should read a lot into the name," Mr. Moskovitz 
said.

Tasks can be named and assigned across the company, then shut down or 
subdivided as the work progresses. People can rank, or have others 
rank, which of their jobs need attention soonest. If a company wants, 
anyone can look in on anyone else's work, offering help and criticism. 
"We think of e-mail, in-person meetings, and whiteboards as our 
competition," said Justin Rosenstein, Mr. Moskovitz's co-founder at 
Asana.

Like Mr. Moskovitz, Mr. Rosenstein came from Facebook, though he 
stopped first at Google where he built an early system for engineers to 
organize their work. At Facebook, he helped invent the "like" button 
and ran Facebook's Pages project, which is a way for brands and 
celebrities to build networks. He was frustrated, he said, building "an 
enormously ambitious project, and losing a lot of time around 
coordination."

Mr. Moskovitz, who was used to working one on one, was by then managing 
200 engineers. His solution was something called "Tasks," which is 
similar to what became Asana, but it was mainly for engineers. 
Eventually the two men decided that helping whole companies get things 
done might be something important that they were good at doing, and 
they left Facebook to start Asana.

Mr. Moskovitz is uncomfortable with his outsize wealth. It remains a 
complex legacy of the Facebook years, he says. What he finds far more 
interesting to talk about is the ambition derived from having built 
something so big. "You learn what an enterprise is capable of. 
Everything else measures against that," he said. "One of the purposes 
of life, and selfishly what makes people happy, is building things that 
are impactful."

Mr. Moskovitz left Facebook on good terms. He socializes with Mr. 
Zuckerberg, who still gives Mr. Moskovitz credit for building much of 
Facebook.

Asana was released and tested on only a few companies in February 2011, 
then more broadly last November, with several thousand users. The 
company has not revealed the size of its user base, but said it had 
been growing rapidly.

Asana will compete with corporate networking products from fellow 
start-ups like Jive Software and Yammer, as well as the offerings from 
big companies, like Chatter, which is owned by Salesforce.com, and 
Socialcast, owned by VMWare. These corporate social networks are now 
used by millions of employees.

The privately held Asana has a small fraction of that. Early adopters 
of Asana include Foursquare, a location-based social network, and The 
Sacramento Bee, where it is used in the online news department. "Having 
all the jobs you have to do in one place definitely speeds up the 
amount we work, though," said Sean McMahon, director of digital media 
at The Bee. He still likes to oversee his employees, though he can do 
it with a lighter hand than in the past.

Managers will probably have to learn new tasks when they use corporate 
social software. "Businesses are in the midst of a retooling because of 
cloud computing, social media, mobility and lots of data," said Tony 
Zingale, chief executive of Jive Software, the largest of the corporate 
social networks. "Groups are starting to make decisions, and 
information to them has to be filtered and personalized."

Mr. Rosenstein, Asana's co-founder, says people will have to learn to 
work independently. "Each company will have to develop its own 
conventions," he said. "I spend a lot of time developing people, 
setting a vision, and explaining why we do what we do." For the faint 
of heart, Asana does offer tools for centralized management.

For the bold, there are outcomes like Asana itself, where everyone can 
name and assign tasks to anyone else, or kick them back to the 
originator if they do not like what they were assigned.

Both Mr. Moskovitz and Mr. Rothstein say their job titles simply are 
"Asana," as are the titles for their 22 colleagues. Pay, however, still 
varies widely, depending on qualifications and how early someone joined 
the company. Mr. Moskovitz pays himself $33,280 a year, which his 
lawyers have advised him is legally less risky for the company than a 
salary of $1 a year.

The title sharing is a pragmatic attempt at company building. "It 
wasn't uncommon for people to call themselves Googlers or Facebookers, 
so we just took it further," Mr. Moskovitz said. "We brought in people 
who could all be managers elsewhere. If one person was named the 
manager, the rest would leave."

For a company full of young, successful people that is run by a 
billionaire, Asana is a remarkably hard-working and down-to-earth place 
-- all the way down. It is on the ground floor of a building that looks 
out on a parking lot of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to 
Animals.

Instead of the fancy pool tables found in Google or the open bars and 
expensive murals at Facebook, on the floor is a single game of the 
1960s hit Twister -- a social game, and one particularly suited to a 
young and flexible work force.