Currently, the Dashboard view of a project is useless for many of my team’s workflows. The metrics Asana provides are not as meaningful as my team would like them to be.
As it stands now, projects are often presented differently than we actually use them. We work with a lot of individual clients, do product setup, and account management for a popular E-commerce website. We have teams dedicated to specific actions that they do all day every day, and other teams that handle the day to day account management. As a result, we have a large number of recurring tasks within projects which often stay open for years at a time. Instead of creating a large number of teams, which would be confusing and messy, we created projects for each client, as well as additional projects that sort each task by function and team. That way, one task associated with a specific action could be added to the client project, as well as the project associated with that team.
The problem lies with the client project. Since the project is open for years at a time, the metrics offered lose context. We care about the number of tasks completed for a specific client, and the number of tasks that have been completed over time, but this is meaningless for us because the metrics are displayed for the entire time the project is open. We end up with graphics like this:
Can you see the task velocity over the last 2 weeks? Me neither. All I can see is that number of tasks in this project is approaching 3,000.
Not only that, when you create a number field and add it to the project, it automatically displays the sum of that field for all time and there is no way to change that date range. Yes I know we spent $3,000, but over what time range? Nobody knows, so the metric has no context.
Looking at your documentation for Project Dashboards, it seems pretty clear to me that somebody intended for projects to be used this way; one of the project titles in our graphics is “Website Design Requests”. If that project were open longer than a year, the metrics in the project dashboard would become useless.
In addition, just because some tasks have number fields, it’s not always appropriate for it to be displayed as a sum. Sometimes we only care about the last reported metric. Other times, we might want the average, or even the average AND the sum displayed for the same field.
TL;DR
Please add a date range filter for the tasks included in the metrics, and give us options for how to summarize data from custom fields in the project. Don’t make us set the date range by individual metrics either, that’s confusing and messy. Put it at the top, so it’s clear and make it universal for the project view so it filters every metric you see in the dashboard. Make it so you can set a default date filter for the project. Let us customize the view for what metrics are shown and how they are summarized. Otherwise, the dashboard as it stands for us is completely useless.
