About Dashboard deprecation

The Google sheet dashboard is pretty integral to how to how we use Asana so deprecating this with no replacement solution other than a more expensive tier is frustrating. I like the idea of portfolios but forcing us to upgrade to maintain the same functionality (when we have a lot of seats currently) feels very short sighted on Asana’s part.

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I sooo hope you’re right. Reading that Asana quote you posted actually gave me the exact opposite feeling. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

I’m still interpreting it the way that I did before, but I did reach out to sales and they said to me after I asked if I could try out the new Portfolio feature that will be replacing the dashboard (because in the help docs, it says to email sales if you are interested in checking it out):

Glad to hear you’re interested in our new features! I’ve marked in our system that you’d like to enroll your domain in a trial starting on 11/1. No further action is required on your part, we’ll take care of it from here.

Here’s what to expect:

  • In late October we’ll send an email to your billing owner letting them know that we will be turning on a trial of our new tier on 11/1 to give them a heads up about the change.
  • On 11/1, you should be able to login and try all our new features. We will be turning on the trials throughout the day, so if you login in the morning and don’t have access, don’t be worried. We’ll get it implemented that day.
  • At the end of trial, the new features will end. If your team/org is interested in keeping those features, our team can hop on the phone and talk about upgrading your plan permanently.

Sooooo yeah, this seems like a really really bad sign. Here’s to hoping their team actually thought through this aspect. Taking away a core feature that has existed for years and then putting the replacement feature behind a higher paywall (2x what you are currently paying per month) would be quite a bit ridiculous.

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I presume that this new ‘Portfolio’ will be similar to what was shown in the CEO Vision video? (screenshot from Asana shares vision for future product roadmap)

If so, maybe this ‘extra premium’ feature set will be able to be deployed to just specific members in our organization? So the additional cost is only applied to those that need this extra functionality? Just totally guessing (hoping) here.

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I’m a new starter with Asana, so the dashboard change doesn’t affect me really. However, I can understand it has an impact on people who have used it and made it part of their project monitoring etc. Excited to see what Asana is adding next!

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Absolutely awful. Removing a feature only to change the layout and put it at a higher price tier is screwing a lot of your customers.

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I had the exact same hope and asked Asana about upgrading just specific users. Here was the reply:
Brian,

All of the members of the organization would have to remain on the same tier. The upgrade applies to the space in which you work rather than specific accounts. Right now the organization is upgraded to premium, not the accounts within the organization. The same policy would apply to the new tier.

Best,
Scott

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I was about to switch to Asana but now wondering if I should. This dashboard that shows progress is the bird’s eye view I’m missing. I can’t believe Asana would revoke such a powerful feature from their existing customers. That just seems totally wrong - and then ask them to upgrade to get the ‘new revamped’ version, even if it comes with bells and whistles they don’t care for.

Please don’t remove the progress feature from the dashboard. :pray:

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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.

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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?

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

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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.

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(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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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