Introducing the newly redesigned Project Status

Hi there!

I’m Elisa, a Product Marketer here at Asana. I’m excited to announce the rollout over the next couple of days of a redesigned Status for projects, making it even easier for you to keep everyone informed on the progress of your work.

Status is available to all Asana users—so to get up to speed on the new functionality make sure to check out the Asana Guide.

Premium and Business users have access to a completely redesigned Status for projects that consolidates all the data about your work in one place so you can tell a data-backed story, enabling stakeholders to easily take action where needed.

Free users see a redesigned Status page to create a clear narrative of their work that helps keep the team and stakeholders on the same page.

But it doesn’t stop there. Stay tuned for more functionality in the future like the introduction of Status for Portfolios (Business users), and colorful charts that bring your Status updates to life (Premium and Business users). We’ll keep you posted as those features are ready to roll out.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to post them in the comments below.

Have a great day!

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This is really nicely implemented. Quick question – if I set up the questions for a particular workspace, then assign ownership of project to a colleague, will those questions follow along with the workspace with each new update? (unless the new owner changes them, of course)

Hi @pjs, and thank you so much for your feedback!

Once you’ve set up your blocks and published an update, they will automatically be remembered even if you handover the project ownership (providing they don’t make any changes to the status structure by adding/removing blocks).

Hope this helps, but please let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

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Hi Elisa,

Hoping you can clarify this for me… If I’m looking at a project that shows this:

If I want to request a status update on the project, it’s up to the owner of the project to manually type in the summary, accomplishments, blockers, etc., and then to fill in the highlights on the right-hand side?

There isn’t a button/feature, to populate any more information for the owner?

Also, were any new filters added to drill deeper into statuses for the project’s tasks?

Thanks!

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Also, is there a timeline for the other functionalities being released for premium users?

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Hi @Greg_Boose :wave:t3:

Any Project Member can set a status to inform other project members on a project’s progress. Tasks, Milestones and Approvals available in the Highlight pane can all be drag and dropped into the project update to illustrate your update.

All features available are listed and described in our brand new guide article :point_right: https://asana.com/guide/help/projects/progress If you have other ideas to improve the Status Update feature, feel free to create a new thread in the #productfeedback, so other people can vote and support your request.

No but we’ve introduced a new timeline view which includes all previous update, you can click in this timeline to deep dive into a specific update.

We do not share our roadmap publicly, I’d highly recommend keeping an eye on this section as we announce every new feature and update as soon as we start rolling them out in Asana!

Hope this helps Greg, have a great Friday!

2 Likes

This is a great improvement! QQ about the insights and number of total tasks. It appears the burnup chart and total number of tasks excludes subtasks.
Some of my projects are quite large, so I don’t feel the burnup chart or total number of tasks does the best job representing the overall status. Also, for large projects, we need to make heavy use of subtasks in order for the timeline view to be useful. In other words if everything was a parent task the timeline would be so busy no one would use it. Has anyone given thought to these things? How can I help? Happy to provide more feedback…

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Here’s one example where I made a bunch of tasks into subtasks, mainly to get the Timeline view to be easier to look at. However, on the Progress page it looks like our project just got easier with less to do, which definitely isn’t the case and I don’t want people to get that impression when looking at the progress report.

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Hi @Eric_Clark :wave:t3:

This is currently expected as subtasks don’t inherit the project from their parent task (you can learn more about this here).

If you’d like to see your subtasks included, you would need to add them manually to your project using the “Tab+P” shortcut. One thing to note if you do this though is that your subtasks will also appear in your project task list, so to avoid any confusion we recommend adding them all in a Section at the bottom of your project!

Hope this helps, but let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

Thanks, Marie. I was afraid of that. Assigning subtasks to the project adds a lot of noise and maintenance, so it’s not realistic for me to do that. Plus it defeats the purpose of trying to maintain a cleaner and more usable Timeline.

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Hi Elisa,

Will the project statuses be viewable from the Team overview? On mobile app in the Home view, I can quickly see the current status of each project below the project title, right next to the team member count.

On desktop, when I click to see all the projects in a team, there is no way to see the status. Can you please add that indicator to the desktop view as well?

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Nice work!

I would really like to be able to drag & drop unscheduled tasks in to the progressrapport as you can in Timeline.

Hi @Brett_Youngberg and @JohanW and apologies for the delay in responding to you!

i would suggest creating a thread in the #productfeedback for both your ideas, I’m sure a lot of our community members would be interested in supporting and upvoting them :slight_smile:

@Marie,

Do you think it would be valuable to also pull in tasks, milestones, or approvals that meet the following criteria?

a) started - to show the new work that began within the time range selected
b) created - to show the new work that was discovered within the time range selected
c) modified - to show where there is active progress via modifications to description or comments

@LEGGO, I think this is a brilliant idea :clap:t3: I’ve added to the post launch report I’m about to share with our PM teams, would you mind creating a #productfeedback to encourage other folks to upvote this request?

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@Marie, what you do think? >>> Additional considerations for Highlights within a Status Update

Thanks @LEGGO, it looks perfect :ok_hand:t3: On my end I’ve shared it with our PM team who thinks it’s a great idea! Hopefully this is something we can implement in the v2 :crossed_fingers:t3:

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Hi folks! Just a quick note to let you know project status updates are now editable :tada: The option can be found in the 3 dots menu as seen below:

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