Initial problem:
Tasks have a large number of fields designed to capture every facet of data to be collected. Very few team members need to see all the fields. In some cases, specific fields should be hidden due to sensitive information.
Further, in a large company such as mine, many stakeholders want access to projects but only need to see a handful of items (example: task name, status, priority, and due date).
Solution:
Project owners should be able to create multiple, customized list views, being able to control which fields are visible on these views. Each view has its own visibility rules (who can see the list view as a whole).
This allows a very dynamic solution described as the following:
Project owners and high ranking personnel can see the full project list view, seeing every field. This allows projects to tie in sensitive information such as finances or management notes.
Employees see a custom list view, seeing only what the project owner has determined to be safe (example: no financial data).
Other organizational stakeholders see yet another list view, showing only the high-level items described above.
Conclusion:
With custom list views, it completes an important gap in Asana’s stakeholder management framework. Project owners can use Asana projects to work AND communicate the right information effectively. This feature will increase revenue by making Asana list views desire to a larger number of employees within an organization, as the number of stakeholders who can now utilize Asana for useful information would expand substantially.
We used saved reports to do this. It gives our managers the high level view without being bogged down by all the various details of the task.
They can customize their reports to show the custom fields that they want individually. They primarily use this in their daily management of the team.
All the details of the task are still there if they open up the task side panel but from the list/board view, they only see the broad details.
Universal reports work for this as well. Managers are able to click on an element inside of the report and it will open up a list view (similar to a saved report really) to give them a bit more insight into that particular area. This is particular helpful when they’re reporting on numbers to me and sometimes have to glance at more details to answer a particular question I ask about a project, campaign, etc.
Reporting for Executives
I wish Asana could handle this well but it can’t. Without calculated fields and the ability to blend data from other sources (e.g. Everhour, Quickbooks, HubSpot), we’ve had to turn to Data Studio.
Our data gets piped into our data warehouse from Asana and other tools and then blended together and visualized in custom Data Studio reports.
More complex to set up but hopefully the first set of options will help ya get most of what ya want.
I prefer to have the parent task with all the data. Then if I need to, I create subtasks that are multi-homed into a project having just the fields filled out that are relevant to that user base.
Having permissions is a very complex and can be messy.
As use case for this has just come up in the business I am currently working for as well. It would be helpful to have multiple views within a project, that can be of the same time, i.e. list view 1 and list view 2, alternatively even having the ability to save multiple filter options and easily select them would be helpful.
Does anyone know if this is something Asana is looking into adding? I’ve recently worked with a contractor who uses another project management tool that has this feature and it is now something that is glaringly lacking in Asana. So much so that our organization is considering switching, which would be chaos to do but we really do need multiple list views for different team members. I would hate to spend all the time and money to switch to learn that Asana has this feature on the way.