Hi everyone,
I’m a consultant at an Asana partner and I’m new to the platform. After a first deep dive, I’ve listed what look like limitations or unexpected behaviours. Before I draw conclusions for a client, I’d like to check that I haven’t misunderstood anything. Corrections, workarounds and roadmap information are all very welcome.
1. Dashboards
- I can’t build multi-project dashboards outside of portfolios. The only option seems to be the instance-wide “universal report”, which covers everything with no way to distinguish between projects. Is that right?
- I can’t find a multi-project Gantt. The only route I see is multi-homing. Is there anything else?
- I can’t create table or list views for these cases:
- Showing priority tasks across projects.
- Showing tasks by department or segment when they sit in several projects.
- The only workaround I found is the number and chart widgets. Clicking one opens the matching task list, but in a view that can’t be edited or saved. Is there a better option?
- I can’t find a progress widget (Except on portfolios)
- There doesn’t seem to be a dashboard-level filter, only widget-level filters. Those sit inside the widget settings and aren’t easy to reach for end users. Is that correct?
- For the “Resource management” widget:
- I can only filter on the team field, not on a task field.
- I can filter on task type, but all custom types are grouped together.
- Grouping by team field makes the chart unusable (we can not move the task after that, the tasks do not appeared and are replaced with case with number), yet it seems to be the only grouping available.
Without group :
With Group on :
2. Portfolios
- Do portfolio rollups only work for numeric custom fields? I can’t aggregate dates or statuses (single-select). Is there any workaround other than converting them to numbers?
- Project progress rolls up from tasks correctly, but project due dates don’t seem connected to the project’s tasks. Is that expected?
- For planning:
- I can’t find a Gantt view on portfolios.
- The “Resource management” widget does pull all tasks, but it ignores dependencies. That lead to make it useless since the purpose of the widget is to manage the resource and here we are just able to see issues, without adapting the roadmap to fix it.
- The timeline view is based on the portfolio’s project dates, not on tasks, so it isn’t connected to the tasks.
- The only workaround seems to be multi-homing. That duplicates data across several boards and isn’t retroactive, so it has to be handled with automations. Is there a cleaner approach?
3. Other points
- I can’t import data to update existing tasks, only to create new ones. This is a major constraint when initialising boards or instances.
- Items load 50 at a time, so a project with 500 rows is very slow to display.
- Subtasks load 25 at a time and the rest must be loaded manually. Search doesn’t find subtasks that haven’t been loaded yet, is this a bug ?
- Formulas seem unable to handle medium-complexity calculations, such as “if status is X then value = 5”, or the duration between two dates. Replacing them with automations makes boards much heavier, for example when editing 15 rows and three columns at once. Am I missing a better approach?
Thanks in advance for any confirmation, correction or workaround. I’d also like to know which of these are on the roadmap.
Regards,
Vincent.