Case Study: FAW saves over 200 Workdays by Implementing Asana; Tackling inefficiencies and Scoring Organisation-Wide Clarity

Delivered by Vanguard Cloud Consulting

Background

The Football Association of Wales (FAW) manages an extensive range of activities across multiple departments, from grassroots programs and marketing to match delivery and strategic initiatives. Historically, FAW staff worked within a fragmented digital environment — at one point, over 170 different systems were in use. This created challenges in visibility, collaboration, and efficiency. FAW recognised the need for a centralised platform to connect work streams, standardise processes, and provide a single source of truth for project management and the SLT alike. After reviewing potential solutions, FAW selected Asana for its flexibility, built-in workflow automation, multihoming capabilities, and potential to unify internal collaboration.

Objectives

• Consolidate project management and task-related tools and processes into one accessible, shared workspace for all

• Improve visibility into projects and tasks across the department and for the SLT

• Reduce duplicated effort and time lost in meetings and status updates.

• Standardise workflows for recurring requests and cross-functional work.

• Foster ownership and accountability at the individual and team level.

Implementation Timeline

2024	PWC mapping of workflows for departments
Jan 2025	System setup launched - Onboarding with Vanguard Commences. Champions and Vanguard work together to build interconnected workflows and templates
Mar 2025	Staff training commenced on a tailored workflow.
May 2025	Soft launch and organisation-wide activation. Beginning second onboarding package with Vanguard focussed on Goal setting and strategy.
Jul 2025	Early adoption success identified
Aug 2025	Official physical launch

Implementation Detail

The FAW approached this change with the utmost preparation using PWC to map out their workflows in detail by department. This enabled the Vanguard team to have a head start translating these into Asana workflows, projects and templates.

Vanguard then worked with each individual team on design sessions, building out their process and workflows, ensuring consistency in areas such as templates and custom fields for reporting purposes. This also included improving upon these processes using Vanguard’s experience from other onboardings, and inputting automation into these workflows to make them streamlined.

Where workflows and teams collaborated, all teams were consulted in the build of portfolios for events such as Seasons and Matches alliviating their initial pain points of visibility and silos. These design sessions took place not only online but also on a week-long in-person session at their HQ in Hensol, Wales.

Once all team workflows and templates were completed, there was an organisation wise training month with sessions ranging from Basics, Intermediate, Advanced, Microsoft Integration and Q&A sessions. These sessions were on FAW specific workflows to ensure there was understanding of their conventions and team processes.

Change Management Approach

Vanguard helped implement Asana’s Change Network structure to drive adoption:

Super users – System experts, troubleshooting issues, and coaching teams.

Change Champions – Advocates within each department, ensuring local support and encouraging uptake.

FAW ensured also there was SLT Sponsorship – Senior leadership endorsement to ensure full organisational buy-in.

Regular meetings with Dan Jose (Head of Special Projects) and the champions were held to understand which teams were utilising the platform, what workflows had been implemented and also understand which teams would need more support and training. We also supported providing a survey for pre and post onboarding to see the effectiveness of Asana on their business. The initial results are below, we are also looking to re-evaluate after a phase two onboarding beginning this month.

Adoption Insights

Initial surveys conducted last month indicated encouraging progress:

• 87% knew what to work on next.

• 83% were satisfied with team collaboration.

• 78% reported consistent processes to manage work.

Success Stories (Some of Many!)

•IT & Data

The IT & Data team at FAW worked with Vanguard to build many processes and reference projects such as an Asset Register, Software implementation templates and User Support workflows. The Asset Register keeps track of different IT assets such as laptops, using custom fields for asset type, model number, current user and Manufacturer. The Software Implementation, is a custom template and the User Support workflow is a board view, ticketing style project using a custom built Asana form for users to fill out.

• Finance

Use Asana for various workflows including foreign payment requests. The Foreign Payment request workflow is standardised by a form and covers such things as Visa Applications, Consultancy and external services such as Photography abroad.

• Travel:

Due to the nature of sporting events - there is a lot of travel for staff - whether it be for matches, to meet sponsors or to visit clubs, The Travel team needed to log departments requests and pricing in an easier fashion than just email. Vanguard helped the team to develop a form to request travel, whether it be for hotels or taxis or trains, so that they would be able to book them, report on department requests and to forward to finance for sign off.

• National Academies Team:

A very interesting use case, they use Asana to work with all their external clubs across Wales to ensure player attendance and reviews are up to date. They also use it to schedule training and interact with club managers and external staff. This uses multi-homing, relies heavily on permissions settings and most importantly guest access abilities.

Key Lessons Learned

• Adoption requires cultural as well as technical change – clear messaging and visible leadership support were essential.

• Integration with existing systems is vital – Asana became the hub, but specialist tools remained for execution and we integrated where required

• Superusers and champions accelerate buy-in – peer-to-peer influence proved highly effective in encouraging usage.

”Our consultant from Vanguard has been incredibly helpful in supporting the FAW on our journey onto Asana. From mapping and building our processes, to training and support, Vanguard are clearly very knowledgeable on Asana and has been very helpful in guiding and supporting our staff with the move. Through meeting our teams and getting to know how we do what we do, it helped gain positive buy-in from our staff and ensured it was very much a collaborative experience working with Vanguard to get the FAW up and running on Asana.” Dan Jose Head of Special Projects at the Football Association of Wales

What's next for the FAW?

• Align all activities with FAW’s 2026 Strategies in Asana

• Introduce additional integrations to streamline workflows.

• Re-survey staff in 2026 to measure further impact and adoption maturity.

• Intervene with teams to fully explore any further use cases in Asana ensuring universal platform use.

Conclusion

FAW’s Asana implementation is transforming how the organisation collaborates, tracks progress, and delivers outcomes. While adoption is still maturing, the centralisation of work into one platform is already yielding measurable improvements in visibility, process consistency, and cross-departmental alignment. With continued support and reinforcement from Vanguard, Asana will underpin FAW’s strategic delivery well into the next cycle. By standardising workflows and consolidating systems, FAW estimates it has saved over 200 workdays annually while scoring organisation-wide clarity through Asana.

🏆 ⚽ Ready to streamline your workflows like the FAW? Let’s help you score your winning goal with Asana. Contact us today.