Friends,
I’m in a bit of a quandary and are looking for some advice/assistance.
First some background: My department is an HR group, and we have implemented Asana such that a portfolio has been created for each of the 500 employees in the company. Mind you, none of the employees have access to the portfolios or any of the projects within them – in fact none of the employees are Asana users. This structure is purely for my department’s internal use. Any HR related changes involving these employees are stored as individual projects (i.e. hiring, on-boarding, immigration, job promotions, etc.) that are stored in each person’s portfolio. We have some very key information about each employee stored as attributes on the portfolio itself (i.e. date of birth, date of hire, spoken languages, etc.) All the portfolio’s representing these active employees are held within a parent portfolio.
We’re trying to find a way to export a list of these employees and their associated attributes (but not the projects or tasks) from Asana…thus giving us a list of all active employees. Ideally this would be to Excel directly, but *.csv or Google sheets would also work.
Given that the Asana export doesn’t show information about the portfolio’s themselves, I was wondering if there might be other tools available for this. I would be grateful for whatever insights or feedback that you can share with me. Thank you!
-Sean
Native Asana options are portfolio sync to GSheets (or Excel; it can work with the same “magic” URL Asana provides) and export to CSV. But I’m not sure how well this would work when the portfolio contents are all nested portfolios (vs projects) and I’m sure you don’t want to have 500 sync’ed spreadsheets (though there might be a way to link those 500 spreadsheets to one single aggregate spreadsheet. I recommend you check help.asana.com for info on the sync and export csv options and see if they work for the portfolio-level custom fields even with nested portfolios. If not, and if there aren’t other limitations (total number of entries, etc.) consider creating one “All” (“flattened”) portfolio containing 500 x n (number of project per employee) projects directly (no nested portfolios).
Thanks @lpb. We have toyed with changing our approach - manage each employee by their own individual projects (instead of with nested portfolios), but that will up-end all of the project templates that have been created as well as having to figure out how to retrofit all existing projects that are being stored within each employee’s portfolio. Our current implementation is much cleaner in that respect, but it lacks the export that we need.
I’ve experimented with a “Cntrl-A” and “Cntrl-C” within the portfolio and a “Cntrl-V” into a spreadsheet, which kind of works, but it doesn’t handle blank fields very well.
We are open to 3rd party options, but I’ve not gone down that route before. If anyone has done a 3rd party, what does that look like? Is it possible to know whether a 3rd party is even able to do what we’re looking for, or perhaps we are just out of luck?
I hear you, but my suggestion, if not hitting other constraints (one of them is 1500 project per portfolio), would be easy to implement for future employees because you would just update each project template to add projects created from it to the “All” portfolio. For existing 500 x n projects, that would be a one-time effort of a couple of hours.
Note that I updated my earlier reply to make a couple corrections.
On another note, if you ever reconsidered this design, you might benefit from my workshop video (free) in the Asana Academy:
I think from what you’ve described, you’d have a much easier go of it if each employee was a task, not multiple projects, but this is only based on the limited info I have.