Today, I wanted to share a fundamental shift in how you organize work: Asana has updated how projects work with teams. Projects no longer need to live inside a team, giving you more flexibility and helping keep team pages focused on relevant, shared work.
What are teamless projects?
Previously, every project in Asana belonged to a single team. With the teamless experience, projects can exist independently and be shared intentionally A project can now:
Exist without being housed in a team
Be shared with one or more teams
Be shared directly with individual people
Create a project without a team
When creating a new project, adding a team is optional.
To create a teamless project:
Click + Create → Project
Choose a template or start from scratch
Optionally:
Add individuals and/or teams as project members during creation
Or, skip selecting a team and just go straight to a project
Associating a project with a team without giving access
Projects can be associated with a team without granting access using the Associated team field, located in project details. You can update this field at any time to reflect the team a project is connected to.
This preserves the historical connection between a project and its former container team.
You can continue to:
Filter projects by team
Group projects in views and reports
Maintain continuity for existing workflows and reporting
The Associated team field:
Reflects organizational context only
Does not control permissions or access
Does not automatically share the project with that team
Access is still managed explicitly by sharing the project with people or teams.
Find your projects
Project Browser
The Project Browser shows all projects you have access to—whether or not they’re shared with a team.
If a project isn’t on a team page, you’ll still find it here.
Team pages
Team pages display projects relevant to a team based on two signals: access and context.
A project will appear on a team page if it is:
Shared with the team (access-based) or
Associated with the team (context-based)
Frequently asked questions
Why don’t I see a project on my team page anymore? Team pages may not show every project you have access to. If you don’t see a project where you expect it, check the Project Browser to find all projects available to you.
Does this change who can access my projects? No. Access only changes if you explicitly share or unshare a project with people or teams.
Can a project be associated with a team but not shared with it? Yes. The Associated team preserves context but does not grant access.
Can a project be shared with multiple teams? Yes. When shared with multiple teams, it will appear on each team’s page.
One question on my end , let’s say I’m a team manager. If I need to report on all my team’s projects, it seems like for every project I create, I need to go through two separate steps:
Share it with my team to grant access
Associate it to my team to establish the link
Only by doing both will the project appear in my team’s charts. Is that correct?
Another option is utilizing portfolios by adding the projects shared with your team into a portfolio and using that portfolio for your reporting purposes.
Question: How do I, as a super admin, FIND these teamless projects when someone inevitably wants us to make a change that they can’t/won’t do for themselves? Finding a project is already a pain in the rear when I’m not sure which team it’s in (yes, I know I can have them add me to the project as an admin, but that is a task in itself).
The admin console is focused around the team and the work within teams, but as these projects aren’t in a team…?
Thanks for the update @Melat_Begashaw , so this means you can add collaborators from other existing teams without necessarily creating a new team for this project?
I’m so glad I finally found this post as this explains the issues in our workflow recently. Our guest users could no longer find and assign themselves to tasks which has been a cornerstone of our process for many years. We create projects by converting them from tasks. We are no longer prompted to pick the team they belong to so we started creating projects visible to our entire org but apparently guests are not part of that. As a work around, we have to share each project with the corresponding team manually and remember to uncheck the boxes that will notify 100+ members when we do this. I wanted to share this caveat incase others also have a similar issue.
Yes like @ka_nishiyama mentioned, Browse projects will show you all projects you have access to and you further drill down by using different filters to find the project you are looking for.
@Melat_Begashaw hi!! Also, folks are seeing projects created from templates being teamless, and they’re not excited about it. Are there plans to add a feature that lets users lock a project template to a team?
Hey @Karl_LEASuccess , I suppose you mean setting the Team as associated, right? Otherwise, you could add the Team as a deafult member of a template so that any created projects show up in the Team’s fly out menu and All work tab.
Hi @Melat_Begashaw , an issue I’m finding with a couple of customers we support is that with projects not being anymore associated to the Team by default, but instead just shared, is that the tasks of projects shared with the Team do NOT appear in the Team Calendar view tab unless the projects are set as associated to the team.
I appreciate the Team Calendar might be a low traffic surface but for folks that use it, they may be wondering why (some of) their tasks aren’t showing up.
