How to create a "sprint" dashboard that pulls-in tasks from different projects within a portfolio

[Antonio_Wolffenbutte]

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to organize sprints for a team working on a few different projects within the same portfolio. I’ve created a “sprint” column and added it to the individual projects.
Is it possible to create a portfolio report/dashboard that shows a list of all the tasks tagged to a given sprint?

[Jan-Rienk]

Hi @Antonio_Wolffenbutte ,

Can you clarify a bit more on what the why behind your question is? What is it that you’d like to get from this report/dashboard/list?

Also, let me know if you want me to move this to Tips and Tricks, where you’ll get a lot more response. (25x as many people)

[Antonio_Wolffenbutte]

Hi @Jan-Rienk -

Thanks for the reply. I’m basically looking to get a list of tasks that will be worked on during a given week or sprint. The goal being to go over all of the task during our weekly kickoff call without having to into individual projects. Let me know if that makes sense.

If we could move this to tips and tricks, that would be great. I’m new here!

Thank you!

[Jan-Rienk]

Sure, no problem.

A possible solution

1. Use a custom field to indicate which sprint it belongs to. I’ll assume you call it sprint.
   I think a single select field would be a good fit. Adding the field to the library is needed as you’ll later want to be able to search/filter based on the field value.
   Add the field to all of the projects (If you have the required plan I’d advise to do this with a bundle as it is less work and makes future change easier)
2. Create a central project, I’ll assume you call it sprint planning
3. Add a rules to all projects:
   when sprint is changed, if sprint is not empty, add to project sprint planning
   Again, if you have the required plan I’d add it to the bundle. Technically you don’t need to add the rule to the sprint planning project, but adding it to a bundle is easier.
4. Add a rule to the sprint planning project only:
   when when sprint is changed, if sprint is empty, remove task from the project.

Now everything that has a sprint attached will pop up in the sprint planning project, and when the field is cleared it will be removed from this project.

You can now also use the sprint field for search and dashboarding.

You can also save differently filtered/sorted project tabs to filter for active sprint and next sprint. (You’ll need to keep adding names for the new sprints in the custom field, and re-organise tabs every week. But that should be like 5 minutes work when you get the hang of it)

Perspective on improvement

Now that I’ve answered your question I’ll add my perspective as an improvement professional.

Your question suggests to me (I might be wrong) that you’re using Scrum to see how much work fits into a sprint. I think the success of your sprint is largely tied to how well you work with sprint goals. The idea in Scrum is that you define a sprint goal, and then add the minimum amount of work you need to to accomplish this goal. Then when you start a sprint you don’t add any work that endangers achieving the sprint goal. This creates focus on added value and teamwork.

Use Milestones to indicate sprint goals and MVP’s, and let the developers use dependencies to indicate what actually needs to happen in what order to achieve the goal.

If you have multiple sprint goals, you’re techincally not doing Scrum, but let’s not dive into that discussion here. I would argue though that the more you are able to approach one goal per sprint, the better you’ll be able to do.

Good luck!

Let me know if you have more questions. If it’s more about improvement than Asana then probably DM is a better option not to take this conversation off topic too far.

[Antonio_Wolffenbutte]

Hi @Jan-Rienk - Thank you for the solution this is exactly what I was trying to accomplish.

Re: improvement, I wouldn’t say we’re using Scrum, more like hybrid-agile. This is a small non-technical team team (marketers, creatives) the goal for working in sprints is mostly to accommodate for shifting priorities on concurrent projects.

Thanks again for your recommendation!