Hi, I am making a report for our Executive Director that shows her entire workload. The primary reason for this is that projects are frequently getting held up because key tasks need her review or input and she does not always have sufficient time to get to all the things she needs to sign off on every week. The report is to help her see all her tasks in different ways -i.e. what is overdue, what is coming up this month for her in each project, what is waiting for her approval, etc. It’s also to help other team members when they are scheduling projects, so they can be aware of what else is on her plate. I am hoping this will reduce over-scheduling.
This is my roadblock: I’ve tried to get the whole org using Asana in the same way, but it is a lost cause, and I have had to accept that different teams will take different approaches. Some teams like using priority, other teams feel its not that relevant; some teams use dependencies religiously and others don’t. Teams use different custom fields for status based on the nature of their team’s work.
This makes it hard to create a chart that organizes all our ED’s outstanding tasks by priority- I need to make team-based charts for her. One thing here that would be really helpful is a chart showing the number of tasks being blocked by her because of dependencies, so she can see what projects are being held up and prioritze for herself what to complete when she can’t do it all.
I can’t figure out a way to to do this? Does anyone have a solution?
There are many solutions for your situation, I think. I’m not sure if I understand what you want correctly, but I recommend setting up your ED’s My Tasks. How about the following?
A workaround I’d use here is to stop treating “blocked” as a dependency-only concept and create one reporting field that every team can feed, even if their task hygiene is different.
For example:
- add a single-select custom field like Ready / Needs ED review / Waiting on external / Blocked
- make that field part of the intake or task template for any work that can land on your ED
- use rules where you can, for example if approver = ED set the field to Needs ED review, and clear it when the task moves forward
- build the widget from assignee + due date + that field, not from dependencies alone
Dependencies work well inside teams that use them consistently, but they’re a weak reporting source if half the org ignores them. A shared status field gives you one layer that is easier to report on across projects.
If you need to separate true blockers from quick approvals, I’d split those into two values so the workload view is easier to scan.
I agree with @Tetsuo_Kawakami that the solution should lie in the ED’s setup and use of My Tasks, and it might also be necessary to include a custom field as I think @Taylor_Brooks suggested.
It will take some effort, but I think this approach will not just address already-blocked work (which is a low bar!) but prevent it. And when it does, it won’t be necessary to have the reporting.
Some aspects of the solution are already present in this overall guide for every Asana user’s My Tasks that I recommend to every client organization and every individual, regardless of their level in the organization, though some leaders will need some augmentation or the help of an assistant, manual or AI!
Ok thanks for the suggestions- I think a combo of trying again to socialize universally using the priority field, and helping my ED customize her my tasks section differently is a workable solution. I had hoped there was a way to reflect dependencies in a report widget, but it seems this confirms that is definitely not possible right now.
