About Dashboard deprecation

This is my concern as well. I need the google sheets functionality for reporting and sharing with my teammates. My teammates need to be able to see all project statuses at a glance when talking to a client. They don’t need to be in asana. They just need access to my dashboard status report in Google.

I hope Asana is planning on creating another tool, if they’re removing the Google sheets functionality.

It would be great to have a easy way to use the Google sheet integration as a dashboard.

I’d be okay removing dashboards if I could view a list of projects by owner. We have 10 or so team members and about 30 projects going on at any given time. We assign owners to the various projects and I manage the owners and have my own project. I generally have an idea of how involved each project is and could get an idea of our team members workload by viewing the projects they own.

If that can’t happen, I was hoping that I could view everyone’s dashboard and each owner would put their projects on their dashboard.

1 Like

Hi,
So what happens with all of this feedback? It doesn’t seem fair that one of the main features is being replaced by something that will double our costs as premium users with only a month’s warning. What are the options here?

For those of us that are on a fiscal year calendar that ends in June of next year, our status reporting will be thrown off after the trial ends since budgets aren’t approved until the end of the fiscal year.

I don’t see any solutions or suggestions from Asana, so just wondering, if this just a place to complain, or does the concerns of this community change anything?

7 Likes

Are any of you reaching out to your reps? This is a massive issue they are not addressing and seem reticent to do so.

1 Like

HI @La_Shawnda_Kendall and thanks for reaching out. I’d recommend contacting directly our support team, they will be in the best position to assist you.

On my end, I’ll make sure to keep you posted as soon as I have some updates regarding the availability Portfolio feature!

I’m pretty disappointed. I was really excited as I settled on Asana for our project management tool and invested a lot of time and effort in working out best practices.
It turned out that Asana timeline was not useful, but we reconfigured.
It turns out that Asana portfolio management is cumbersome, so we reconfigured.
It turns out that Asana subtasks are not really useful, but we reconfigured.
It turns out Asana can’t push a reminder for a time sensitive ToDo item, but we reconfigured.
It turns out that its really tough navigating multiple projects\tasks\input on our Android devices, no real reconfiguring there, we just deal with it, or defer input until we are at a Lappy or desktop.
One of the remaining deal maker features is (was) the dashboard. At this point Asana is a fairly expensive ToDo list with some irritating limitations and inadequate executive tools.
My field guys are just guest users, and if we stay with Asana it will stay that way due to the Android input limitations. Best I can get from the field is to check off a task or thumbs up a notification.
My managers are split, I suppose we may demo the portfolio thing, but I’m fast losing interest. I looked at the Home Page, IDK how anyone thinks that bears any relation to the dashboard, or how having to drill down into 20 projects one at a time is comparable to an overview.

8 Likes

(This is excerpted from my article about how Dashboards are being eliminated.)

In terms of functionality, this change is a good thing. Most teams don’t use Dashboards because the information they provide requires manual updating regularly, and I think most people find the Google Spreadsheet integration has little to no value in terms of what information is actually useful for project reporting. I’m willing to bet Asana has the data to know Dashboards weren’t being used widely.

The new portfolio solution will be so much better. But the problem I see, similar to the last time prices were increased, is how this change is being rolled out.

A great leadership lesson I learned is:

COMMUNICATION + TIME = UNITED CHANGE

Giving users less than 2 months to change what COULD be a major shift for them is an enormous headache. Add on top of that how this change has been (or not been) communicated (I didn’t receive an email…most users are probably not scanning the forums) and it feels like Asana, Inc. is hiding something.

And based on what I’m reading on this page, there is something being hidden that wasn’t communicated in any of Asana’s announcements so far. Asana is taking away what was a core feature people paid for—and perhaps a selling point for switching to Asana in the first place—with no replacement unless you switch to Enterprise and pay 2x what you’re currently paying for Asana.

I think a lot people are going to feel very frustrated by this. A user like me should not be the one having to point this out. Asana has HUGE switching costs. When someone chooses to run their team or their whole company on Asana, they’re doing it by putting trust in the product and the company backing it. To have features suddenly yanked out from under them and told to pay double the price (a $6000 difference for a 50-person company!), that breaks the trust.

Did the switch need to happen? Yes, they are creating a much better solution. But why punish and frustrate customers? Seems like better solutions would be:

  1. Give portfolios to all Premium customers
  2. Give a portion of portfolio features that at least replace the functionality of dashboards (my recommendation is to hide Portfolio Custom Fields behind the Enterprise paywall since users are already used to having to pay extra for Custom Field functionality)
  3. Grandfather existing users into portfolios and have all new users pay for it, like what Asana, Inc. did previously with Advanced Search

I hope all Asana users get to hear a better announcement about this with the details people actually need to plan. They deserve to know more than, “We’re taking away Dashboards and replacing it with something better,” because that’s a partial truth. To suggest that the new Homepage somehow replaces Dashboards is not accurate at all. They have completely different purposes.

OK, getting off my soapbox now :v:

I love Asana and based on how they handled feedback from the most recent price increase, I encourage everyone to share your feedback, avoid getting angry yet, and trust they’ll do the right thing for their customers.

23 Likes

A new Asana2Go feature may offer partial relief for some users; the above is a screenshot of one sample output.

So as not to divert this thread’s topic/discussion, please find more info, and confine any discussion of Asana2Go’s projects dashboard/roll-ups feature, to the following new thread.

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

Thanks,

Larry Berger
Asana2Go & Asana Certified Pro consultant at Trilogi

6 Likes

746/5000
I’m honestly feeling betrayed. When I chose Asana almost 3 years ago, I did mainly because of the evolution of the tool. I was conquered by the idea that by signing the premium version, I would have access to all the evolution and new features that had been applied. The idea that you will now end the dashboard, and especially that will add the functionality of portfolio and google sheets features in a much more expensive version makes me extremely sad. The effort we make in Brazil to pay Asana is not small, after all the value of our money against the dollar is 1/4. I really hope that Asana’s team keep all the previous companies within the version that has all the features without charging extra for it.

10 Likes

I spoke to Asana support today and they confirmed that portfolios will only be available on the Enterprise plan.

When I asked for my feedback to be passed on, the support agent just copied and pasted the same spiel about how “excited” they are to announce portfolios at an additional cost. Either they didn’t read my email or the support service is run by bots generating a response based on keywords.

This whole thing is so disappointing and totally out of kilter with the impression I previously had of Asana.

8 Likes

They already have this but it sounds like they are going to deprecate it.

I’ve read through most of these comments but still don’t feel I have a nice clear concise answer to my burning issue with the retiring of dashboards.

We routinely have meetings where we go through my dashboard and the most recent PROGRESS update is read aloud to the group. This has been an invaluable time saver for our process.

Will there no longer be a single place where all these “progress” text blocks are centrally located? I see lots of fancy pages with colored dots and ‘progress’ bars and all these things but quite frankly that doesn’t actually do anything useful for my team. Knowing that 5 out of 7 items listed in a project are complete doesn’t give an accurate snapshot of the status of a project. We need to have the option of a block of text updating the current situation. Will we no longer have this?

Thank you.

4 Likes

Agreed. New pricing tier for these new features is a large jump. From $10 to $20 a user per month is insane.

4 Likes

@Richard_Uruchurtu, Yes. :thinking: They can depreciate the dashboard but keep the Google Sheet integration available.

How will that work since you add projects to the Google sheet via the dashboard?

I would say they let me import all my projects, but that would be to much. They would need to filter it somehow. Maybe by only importing my starred projects. I can then filter it on my own after that.

I am a generally very calm and roll-with-the-punches kind of person and absolutely understand companies needs to evolve and grow their product. I get that when offerings change there will be things that people don’t like (and sometimes that thing will simply be change). We experience that in our workplace all the time and it’s just part of business and life.

That said, I think the Asana team absolutely needs to hear how not-at-all-minor-or-insignificant these changes are going to be to peoples work flows. I mean this constructively but think there’s also value in sharing just how frustrated we are. It makes me wonder if the team at Asana truly understands the ways people are using their platform.

Until yesterday my biggest complaint about the Asana experience was, without any doubt, that the dashboards only showed a truncated view of the most recent STATUS UPDATE text block. (Timeline also needs significant growth but we’ve always chalked that up to an ongoing evolution that will eventually get there). Project overview options need to be more robust and deeply customizable. All companies need to be able to see all our project statuses in one place, and because of the hyper complicated nature of many projects often the only truly accurate way to present a project’s current position is with the STATUS UPDATE texts. My team absolutely needs a place to view those all on a single page.

I have dug more into these Portfolio pages (which apparently we won’t have as a small business using Professional plan?) and while they don’t even seem to provide this functionality they at least put all this information a click or two away.

What am I missing? Will this simply not be an option in Asana and we’ll be required to visit each individual page and open the status report during our weekly meetings? If so then Asanas usefulness is taking a significant hit in value for our workflow.

I honestly don’t understand and feel that I must be being dense and simply not understanding something. It seems like the most obvious, necessary, baseline expectation that a project management platform would include (in all versions of its offering) a tool that allows overview of all active projects. I am legitimately flummoxed.

I loathe that I’m finding myself being the guy putting this out there because it always seems so petty (but I get it now) - We’ve gone from 95% satisfied with Asana to starting to consider alternatives.

Can someone please provide me some clarity on what the thinking and justifications are here? In what line of thought was the conclusion reached that only enterprise customers would need to have access to total project overview and even then - wouldn’t need to see the most recent status updates at the front of their UX?

I’m open to be wrong about my assessment of the trajectory here. I hope I am. But either way I hope the Asana team is taking the opportunity to sit down and discuss either the value-impact their changes are bringing their customers or their messaging about this value because one of the following is absolutely true:

A. The changes being implemented are a significant value reduction for their customers and represent a misunderstanding of what those customers need

or

B. The changes do provide that value still but that has not yet been effectively communicated.

Thanks for your time. Wish my words were able to be more positive. Asana-crew your work has helped my business achieve great process strength and elevated success - I really look forward to seeing how you continue to do so. Thanks for all your efforts.

21 Likes

Dashboards are discontinuing from 1 Dec. While they are replaced by Portfolios, I hear Portfolios will only be available in a new pricing tier called Business (and Enterprice), which is rumoured to cost DOUBLE the Premium plan price. Does anybody else think that is unfair? Either you are forced to pay double or you lose a feature that you have been paying for without a discount on the Premium price?

10 Likes

Thanks for reaching out @Jonathan_Chapman and my apologies for all the confusion here.

We already have a thread on this topic, so I’ve gone ahead and moved your post into this main thread. If you haven’t had a chance to, I’d recommend taking a look at this post in particular. On my end, I’ll soon update this thread with more precise information!

1 Like