A better Dashboard for high level overview

[Nigel_Hill]

I too am a new user (though have tried out the freemium version in the past). I started using it because I was annoyed with the microsoft equivalents and how they failed to integrate with their own products!
One thing that attracted me to asana was teh dashboard, which I had assumed would give you a quick summary of all tasks in different projects across our organisation.
Having now set up 6 projects with various tasks in it, I have found that it does not do that at all! It just tells you how many tasks are outstanding and their due date, then you appear to have to open each individual project to get task details! Even if you use the google sheet option is does not give an across the board task summary! With respect, surely there should be a facility to see all the tasks in each project in one place!
and the reports - why on earth cant I get a report for all tasks assigned to everyone?
Bloody hell, I honestly thought Asana was going to be heaps more sophisticated than the MS equivalents. Unfortunately, it’s only when you go to the trouble of migrating everything over that you find out that there are (oh so obvious) shortcomings! Surely it is very obvious that at least an administrator/owner (and indeed some other team members) would want and need an overview of all ongoing tasks regardless of who created them or to whom they have been assigned?

[Joseph_Neu]

What about the number of overdue tasks?. This is a neat feature of the google sheets reporting off of dashboard that would be great to see in the progress box native. Further, the google sheets feeding a reporting tools would be more functional if you could have more than one dashboard.

[Klaas_Groen]

What I’d like to see is a customizable dashboard with multiple options to choose from:

1. With the same ease as the button ‘add project summary’ I would like to be able to select a custom field on which I want to see a summary. This would create a cross-project view that zooms in on my selected custom field.
2. In addition to that I like the idea of using a number as Y-axis as a scale. In this way I can make a graph that contains story points as a scale instead of the number of tasks.
3. As third I’d like to be able to flip the graph to make a burndown chart.

All these features would fit in the concept of customizable dashboard. Would be an excellent premium functionality that fits the current ease of use of Asana.

[Michelle_Riverson]

Multiple Dashboards. I’ve been lurking here for a while watching for other solutions but have yet to find a good fit. Like many have mentioned, multiple teams with multiple projects and upper management who want to have an overview of a certain group of projects and moments later would like an overview of some other group of projects. constantly adding and removing projects from my dashboard in order to generate the report they want is time consuming and a bit silly.

[Sami_Linnanvuo]

Hi Klaas,

You can do most, if not all of that with the Screenful add-on:

1. You can set up a dashboard filtered by a custom field, see https://screenful.com/asana/custom-fields/

2. You can create graphs with custom field values as the unit, see https://screenful.com/asana/assigning-estimates-to-asana-tasks/

3. You can get a burndown chart for your Asana project, see Burndown chart for Asana - Screenful Guide for Asana

Give it a try or let me know if you want to learn more!

[Evan_Gray]

@Peter_Skjoldager and @Alexis, this is a great thread. Did you ever find a solution for connecting projects and tasks to strategic goals or other organizational objectives? Our small charitable foundation is new to Asana, and this feature is the one thing I am hoping it will do for us in addition to providing task management. Thanks!

[Daniel_Stanton]

For managing a Program of work, I need to manage a group of projects across different hierarchical teams. I believe the best practice way of doing this is to create a “Team” (in my case, “Apps”) that includes all Apps projects, and invite any colleagues needed to complete them.

Although this gives me a central place to manage my program of work, I don’t have an easy way to communicate Apps program progress to stakeholders. While Dashboards is useful to an extent, every Stakeholder needs to build their own dashboard, and dashboard organisation is limited.

I want to set up a shared “Team” dashboard so that senior management doesn’t have to do this individually (they don’t have the time, so it won’t happen otherwise)

I want to organise a shared “Team” dashboard so that a hierarchy of importance or delivery schedule is clear (I believe a column layout for a Dashboard, like a Board project, would be fantastic)

I want to use the Dashboard features for the “Team” dashboard so that I can take advantage of Status Updates, Trafic Lights and Email Summaries, and so that I do not have to manually repeat this 10-20 times across every project in a manual admin-heavy workaround (such as a Project of References to Projects)

[Bastien_Siebman]

I don’t have a solution (yet) I need to re-read your message, but I can already tell you that I build custom dashboards for clients, which content comes from Asana, are 100% customizable and hosted on a private URL to be shared to others.

Bastien
Asana consultant, author and developer

[Vince_Mustachio]

@Daniel_Stanton, check out this topic which asks for this among other Dashboard improvements.

A better Dashboard for high level overview

Dear Community and dear Asana, This is my first post, so please excuse any rookie community mistakes. I have been using Asana for a couple of months, and are trying to migrate my team into Asana. We are a small trade organization, so we have lots of different projects in many different areas, both short and long term projects. Ie. we are not a “production” company, so our needs might be different than some other users. I think the “task” management features are great, and that is what Asana…

My work around is to use the Asana feature that allows you to open the dashboard in Google Sheets. From here I can do a lot more to arrange and format the data. Then I share that Google Sheets with the team.

[Marie]

Hi guys! Merging this thread with A better Dashboard for high level overview to avoid duplicates! Hope that’s ok!

[Bridgette_Foster]

Our team is new to Asana too. I have been searching for the Team Dashboard and found this thread. I really hope this happens sooner than later. We pull Asana up in our meeting and look at the dashboard on my login (Admin) but it doesn’t allow us to see the Project Owners status updates. WE NEED A TEAM DASHBOARD!!! :)

[Jean-Michel_hardy]

Hi Bastien, I didn’t read all comment but can you extend your comment here? Best JM

[Stephanie_Oberg]

MULTIPLE DASHBOARDS: Right now I can only create a single dashboard. I try hard to show people ONLY the Asana info they’re interested in, to avoid the user perception that there’s a huge amount of extraneous info to be waded through in Asana. I find myself constantly rearranging the sole dashboard and adding or deleting projects…so I can make the single dashboard work for every group I meet with. Having to rack my brains to make sure I’ve put back all the right projects every time does not help my productivity. I would like a chance to create multiple custom dashboards.

SHARING DASHBOARDS: Also, my dashboard can be used and seen only by myself…for other users the best I can do is coach them or urge them to create their own dashboard. I would like to be able to share a link for the custom dashboards.

Project count and task count: I sometimes wonder if Asana developers and testers take into account useability for larger teams or those with numerous projects and tasks. Some functions and especially workarounds may make sense if you only ever work with 5 projects each with 50-75 tasks. E.g. solution where one creates a tag to make up for the absence of multi-level sort…or where one moves completed tasks out of a project to avoid clogging up the timeline view. I have at least 30 projects active (I don’t know a way to actually see all of them to count ) and a task count from 300-1000 is nothing out of the ordinary. When the task count blows up, that’s when the fully featured filtering and sorting becomes essential.

[Laura_Johnson]

This would change my life. I totally agree.

[Marie]

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us and to provide us with some context @Stephanie_Oberg, really appreciate it! This is definitely something on our radar; if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d recommend checking out this video in which Justin (Asana co-founder) talk about our vision for the future of Asana; I think you will find it interesting.

We already have a thread on this topic in the Forum, so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with it to gather all feedback in one place; hope that’s ok!

[Jcc]

In case folks haven’t seen yet, dashboards are going away: About Dashboard deprecation - #2 by Thawatchai_Saengtham . It’s unclear how the Asana team plans to replace them (we can hope that Portfolios will cover some of our use cases), but further discussion on this topic belongs on that thread.

Here’s a thread that I opened yesterday which can give you an idea of how my team is using multihoming to manage project/team hierarchy, without dashboards, and a specific feature request to make it really “work” for us: Sync priority ordering between multihome projects . Maybe it will help some of you find a non-dashboard solution.

A multihome “parent project” containing all of the relevant tasks is a useful overview and would be especially so with the feature I requested there.

[lpb]

For @Stephanie_Oberg, @Laura_Johnson and perhaps others who commented in this long thread, you may want to check out (new as of yesterday):

Asana2Go Adds New Projects Dashboard/Roll-Up Feature (and partial relief for Asana Dashboards removal) Integrations

[image] Asana2Go now creates projects dashboards with rolled-up information from multiple projects and teams including the latest projects’ Progress Status Updates. One key use is as a substitute for some of the functionality of Asana Dashboards which will no longer be available in Asana after Portfolios is released, a new feature with a new tier/fee. But that’s only one example usage. You might need to report across multiple projects for various reasons, and A2G formats are customizable. No…

For a short video of this new Asana2Go feature:
Demo/How-To Video - Asana2Go Projects Dashboard/Roll-ups

@Stephanie_Oberg, you can easily have multiple, simultaneous Asana2Go “dashboards” just by creating multiple Asana projects.

Thanks,

Larry Berger
Asana2Go & Asana Certified Pro consultant at Trilogi

[Brian_Massey]

In that video about the future of Asana, which of those new features will be available for premium members/organizations?

[kbuchanio]

I spoke to someone in Asana sales yesterday. It looks like unless you upgrade to an “Enterprise” plan, which is apparently a thing now and extremely expensive, there will be no replacement for dashboards.

[Mark_Hudson]

This is such a great new feature, Larry. Really handy for presenting to senior management. Nicely done.