Portfolios have come a LONG way. It is almost at the point where we can use Asana how Asana should be used. As a Sr. Program Manager for a Fortune 5 company, and whom have worked at other Fortune 500 companies, Asana’s functionality has always limited us to a hacked hiearchy. For years we had to work where Team = Division, Portfolio = Pillar, Project = Team, Task = Project, and Sub-Tasks = Task. This was because Portfolios lacked any real way to viewing projects in the ways we needed. But becuase we did this ‘hack’, it made a lot of functionality like Workloads not work properly.
Things have changes considerably over the years. We now have custom fields in our Portfolio views that we can sort and filter by, so we now can see and organize our projects properly. Workloads have been improved to allow us to see assignments all the way down to tasks. And overall it feels like Asana has made large strides into getting the system setup for us to use it as it should be used.
What this means, for example using my current hierachy, is this:
Team = our UX Studio
Portfolios now act more like a folders so I can have this
Studio All Up = Portfolio
- Pillars = Portfolios
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- Teams = Portfolios
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- Projects = Projects
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- Tasks = Tasks to complete that project
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But we still have a large number of limitations with the portfolios. Some of these are that we cannot create templates, we cannot multi-select / multi-chage projects, we can’t run rules on projects within our Portfolios, we can’t create a Gantt chart for our projects in a portfolio, we don’t have forms to add projects to our portfolios, etc.
I’ve seen a few topics in the forum asking for a few of these features, but really it comes down to one major theme - Please give the same functionality you have at a Project level to the Portfolio level. This should be a default in that everything you perform on tasks, should be something at a Project level.
This will make the system not just a task management system, but a defacto Project Management system. All my project teams I’ve been on manage at a Project Level (What is the status of the project, when will that project be complete, how do projects align on the Gantt, what is my resourcing like for taking on a new project, etc). The task level is for the team working the project to handle.
So consider this topic not just a ‘Feature Request’ but more of a goal request. There are a lot of components that will need to be accounted for, but if you do this change it will be so much easier for me to incorporate on my teams and sell it to other teams.