Grouping Dashboards (Dashboard Folders) + Archiving Dashboards

English Forum Product Feedback
, , , , ,
1

Hello,

When creating a report, there is currently a limitation of 20 boards per dashboards.
In some cases, due to this limitation, you might need to create more than one dashboard in order to present all the different boards you need. In other cases, you might want to create multiple dashboards, each focusing on some kind of aspect of the project.

In both cases, the reporting section gets cluttered very easily, very fast.

It would be very helpful if similarly to what portfolio’s are for projects, there would be a way to group dashboards under a folder or portfolio of some sort and add sorting capabilities of some sort.

Here is a scenario for example:

Report topic: 2023 Company/Team Goals
Dashboard 01: Company goals progress
Dashboard 02: Teams goals progress (yearly)
Dashboard 03: Teams goals progress (Q1)
Dashboard 04: Teams goals progress (Q2)
Dashboard 05: Teams goals progress (Q2)
Dashboard 06: Teams goals progress (Q3)
Dashboard 07: Teams goals progress (Q4)
Dashboard 08: Business Unit X goals progress (yearly)
Dashboard 09: Business Unit Y goals progress (yearly)
Dashboard 10: Business Unit Z goals progress (yearly)

I can continue and easily triple the list of dashboards I would need in order to cover the 2023 company goals reports I need. And in 2024, I would need to duplicate them all (and at the moment, there is no “Archive” function in the reporting feature, so it will get really messy really fast.

Like I said, having this many dashboards mixed up with a hundred other reports from different projects, years, teams, etc., and without a way to organize them in any basic system such as folders or even rearranging them by simply moving them around, or viewing them as a list instead of cards, is creating a cluttered experience to an already pretty cluttered overall experience you could easily find yourself in when using asana.

I hope this will be of interest to the product team and that it will be solved in the near future. I am sure it will be extremely useful to the users.

Thank you,
Itay

1 Like
2

Hello @Itay_Kurgan

This is an interesting scenario and I can see how it is helpful.
Without knowing the full context of your user case, please allow me to suggest a different way of working with reports.

Using your own example, I would question why you are creating four dashboard for the progress, one per quarter.

The alternative option is to create one dashboard. The dashboard is live, so for the first instance you get Q1 progress. You can download the image and use it when you communicate the progress with your internal stakeholders. I do not see the need to keep the dashboard static.
So when you come to Q2, you can use the same dashboard and change the time period and so on.

This way, you reduce the number of dashboards to topic / type.

Apologies if I did not understand you example fully. Regardless, increasing the number of boards is a good suggestion :wink:

3

Hey @Rashad_Issa

Thanks for your insights.

For starters, I think that being able to organize the Reporting page is necessary no matter what the use case… it is a mess and difficult to navigate even If I have 1 dashboard per project. There are no sorting options and no filter capabilities.

We have around 30 company goals, about 110 team goals with about 260 “sub goals” and something like 70 company projects to monitor…
many of these require universal reports, so you can imagine the clutter our project management and executives might have on there reporting pages.

The new portfolio dashboards are a great help for this, but still don’t solve all the issue’s.

I require several different dashboards because:

a. There is a limit of 20 charts per dashboard and sometimes I require more to be able to present all the different fields in my projects.
b. I have a different audience for each dashboard, so each dashboard focuses on the items most relevant to that audience.

If we focus on my example scenario, there are a couple of reason’s I work this way.

At the beginning of the year I create all these dashboards in advance. This in it’s self is much easier now that asana has added the capabilities to duplicate entire dashboards (a real time saver!), and I do it in advance because it is much more efficient this way rather than dealing with it several times during the year.

We work with the OKR methodology, and the Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 dashboards are never static. At the beginning of the year we plan our goals, and monitor the progress on a monthly basis. A goal that is set for Q3 (for example) doesn’t necessarily mean that you only start the work at the beginning of Q3, your progress towards Q3 can begin in Q1. Monitoring on a monthly basis insures a better chance of achieving the goal on time, and more importantly raising red flags on time, in advance, so that planning can adapt to work around issues.

I think If Asana creates a “porfolio like” experience for the reporting page, users will benefit from a more organized, clutter free experience.

Lets see… I might be the only one that has this issue :wink:

1 Like
4

I have the same issue. I need the ability to add Dashboards to Portfolio’s. I do group all my my Projects into the year. For instance, 2022 Portfolio holds everything we did in 2022. And I will do this again in 2023. However, I can’t put my dashboards in these Portfolios.

5

Our team also share Portfolios for a project or group’s work. It is frustrating to have everything in the Portfolio, BUT the dashboard. This means that our stakeholders and team members have to manage one more link, which commonly gets lots.