Make way for Universal Workload!

English Forum News Product Launches
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Hey Asana Community,

I’m Ben from the product marketing team, and I’m excited to share news on the latest updates from our resource management team. Starting today, customers with an Enterprise plan can create workload views from the Reporting tab and manage people’s capacity across all of Asana!

Workload is a powerful resource management tool that allows you to track team bandwidth and capacity in real time, ensuring no one is at risk of burnout and that everyone is focused on the right priorities. In the past, workload was only available in portfolios, which limited what work you could pull into a workload view and was a suitable resourcing solution for our smaller teams.

With the new universal workload experience, available on the Enterprise tier, large organizations can now pull in people’s work from across all projects and easily see the global capacity of anyone on the team. This new experience ensures that as you’re rebalancing work and tracking bandwidth, you’re getting an accurate picture of people’s capacity across all projects, not just the specific tracks you might be managing.

To get started, navigate to the Reporting tab on the left side navigation bar and click “Create” and select the Workload option. Once created, you can add people to the view and their workload waves will automatically populate.

We recommend watching this 3 mins walkthrough video to see universal workload in action:

Just like with dashboards, you will only be able to see work that is visible to you. Private tasks and tasks in private projects will not appear unless you already have access to them.

But wait, there’s more!

Over the next few months, the resource management team is shipping additional improvements to this new workload experience, including robust filtering, sharing options, percent allocation views, and most importantly, subtask support! We know many of you have been asking for these features, and we’ll keep you updated as these ship out.

As always, if you have any questions, please add them to the thread and we’ll do our best to address them. We hope you’re just as excited as we are!

Please note Universal Workload is available to 10% of users as of today. It will become available to all Enterprise users over the next few days. Keep an eye on the comments for updates on the rollout.

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So excited for this! This will be incredibly helpful. Is there an eta for subtasks being integrated in to workload? There won’t be a use case for us until there is but love that this is being rolled out! Will motivate us to start using the estimated time feature!

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Great work, can’t wait to see it. Obviously disappointed to see it only available for Enterprise, but that is aligned with Asana strategy.

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@Ben_Watkins/@Marie , adding 2 early issues to fix. For known RECURRING tasks, the workload view can’t PROJECT into the future to add these tasks to potential time slots which then doesn’t do a good job of accurately being able to manage workload. My meetings in the screening shot below are recurring weekly. For example, a daily (M-F) recurring 30min meeting using Estimated Time field only shows on the latest date it is due and NOT all future weeks for proper time allocation planning. Is there a better method to tracking meeting time when use capacity for this workload function? I feel the workload “engine” needs to be able to project into the future for recurring task before they actual “recur” (i.e. by completing the current instance of the task) since this is likely never feasible PRIOR to needing to manage the workload with relation to those future recurring tasks.

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Other thing I noticed is that the workload daily sum (when you hover over the user name, its the sum above the purple mountains) when using Estimated Time rounds UP to the nearest hour (along with the time within any given TASK; from my screenshot, each of those meetings are actually < 1hr), even when say a single task only takes 30min. Is this intentional and can it be adjusted to not round or at least to closest 0.5hr? This is really an issue only (at least for the Estimated Time function) for the beginning part of any whole hour where 1hr 5min of Estimated Time would round up to 2hrs and the “manager” would lose the ability fill that additional say 55min of free time with additional work since the Workload view would show that 2 hrs of work is being done when in fact it is not. On any given day, that is potentially an hr lost in an 8hr day and across an entire week, this is nearly 5 hrs or 10% of lost available time from the view. Not sure if due to space constraints, this was the chosen display method?

Also if this can block out dates via upcoming “Out of Office” in the user settings, that would help managers NOT schedule things in certain dates. Not sure if the better method (if possible) is better Outlook integration for future out of office and days to avoid duplicate documentation.

Thanks!

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@Ali_Mozenter , on another thread it was mentioned “summer” for subtask rollout as that was the first question I asked. Since these aren’t associated with Projects, even if they get dumped under a Misc row on the Workload, good enough for me to view very top level Estimated Time for a day for an employee until they figure out the association to a Project. I agree, can’t use much until we can aggregate both into a workload view as some Teams/Projects use Tasks vs Subtasks for various things.

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Any idea if this is a long term position? We’re on business tier but would still be excited about this feature?

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My own personal opinion: this is a long term strategy and I don’t believe the feature will be offered to Business. The existing workload in Business might be improved overtime though :person_shrugging:

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Is there a way to set a capacity level based on task count?

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This is currently not possible. The reason is that in 99% of cases it doesn’t make sense because tasks have wildly different sizes…

That being said, if you attach a “weigh” of 1 to each task, potentially through an automation, you get the same result.

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I would like to make a general recommendation…to add closed captioning to videos

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Is this any different to the workload tab in a portfolio with every project in it?

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The main differences:

  • universal workload could show things you don’t have access to if the right person created the report, so if it is not the case yet I guess workload would one day show a real workload even in private projects
  • no limit on the number of projects (currently 250 projects in regular workload)
  • no need to manually add all projects one by one (or use a tool like mine)

@Julien_RENAUD do you agree with my first item?

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My question on that first bulletpoint… I’m not even sure say a Super Admin can see private projects. Even if someone with access to the private project originally created the workload view (so that private projects are added), I don’t know what would occur f they shared that view with others who don’t have access. IS it dynamic in that it removes those projects and “workload” from the view in real-time based on permissions to view a project or just upon initial creation?

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Super Admin can’t see private projects. But for other reports in Universal Reporting, you see the values based on the data the creator sees. Not sure if that applies to Universal Workload. @Julien_RENAUD @Arthur_BEGOU any idea?

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Hey Bastien

This isn’t correct. Right now Universal Workload will only display data based on projects and tasks you have access to!

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It would be super cool to hear (without revealing too much on your side, of course) about your use cases, so we can create some content for it! :slight_smile:

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So to clarify the report is dynamic in that no matter who created it, it always auto-filters to the person viewing it as far as permissions go for visibility into private projects/tasks?

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not sure if im missing something, but are there plans to offer ‘share’ and ‘favorite’ options for these new report types? im not able to share with my team or even get it on my side panel.

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Daylight Studio cannot like, love, want, this more!!! thank you!!

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Hi @Brock_Taylor :wave:

Correct! You will see in Universal Workload what you can see in Asana. That means that tasks private to you will show up in your Universal Workload view, but if you share it (which is coming this summer), people will only see these private tasks in Workload if you intentionally share these private tasks with them!