Organization-wide view for Workload

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I have a decent understanding of how the Workload feature works in conjunction with a Portfolio.

However, I’m trying to make it work well for our entire organization. We have a team of 30+ Asama members who work from various projects. In addition, new projects are created weekly and sometimes daily.

We are looking for a Workload view where we’re able to quickly view our the “Workload” for our entire company at a glance. We want to be able to see a top down view of everyone’s bandwidth

  • what they are working on
  • what they have available
  • so we can schedule properly

Basically, the Workload feature looks like it’s what we need (assuming we’d be able to get everyone to add a value for Estimated Hours for every single task they have).

But it has a few shortcomings that I’m trying to solve for:

  • By default, it doesn’t pull in subtasks (because by default a new subtask isn’t technically assigned directly to a specific project). This means we’d have to manually add every subtask to a specific project (in order for it to show within the Portfolio > Workload tab)
  • We’d need a way to ensure every new task that gets created (sometimes it gets created via Zapier, manually, via email, etc.) gets added to a certain Project (in order for it to show within the Portfolio).

To overcome those shortcomings, it’d be great if there was a way to essentially automate this: any time a task is edited or created, make sure it’s in a project called “Team Timeline” (of which would be within the Portfolio). That way every single task would always be in the Workload if assigned (and had an Estimated Hours value).

Anyone else experience these “shortcomings” or have a solution on being able to see their team’s bandwidth, to basically see “who doesn’t have 8 hours of work on Thursday, so I can assign this 2 hours task to them”?

I also understand there’s a limit of 250 projects per Portfolio (so I’m hoping we don’t run up against that too).

Separately, I see there’s the Universal Workload option with Enterprise plan (we have Business plan), but I’m not sure if it overcomes these mentioned shortcomings or not. I believe it overcomes the need to ensure a task is within a specific Portfolio Project, but not sure if that also overcomes the fact that subtasks don’t get assigned to any project by default.

Any tips/suggestions?

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Hi @FreshyJon

Apparently, that part will soon also be fixed with the Universal Workload - see quote below:

For the rest, I think the way you do it is correct, considering the feature limitations.
I don’t have other tips, but hopefully others might have :wink:

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@FreshyJon, I’m considering the same issues you are when evaluating Workload on the Business plan (Enterprise is not an option) vs. third party capacity planning tools that integrate with Asana.

Have you made any progress on your decision?

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@Shawn_Kerendian for now, we’ve abandoned the idea of using Asana’s built-in Workload feature, due to some of its other quirks/limitations (e.g., if a task is in more than one project, then it shows that task [when expanded] multiple times for the person).

For now, we’re just using a single Project, tossing all tasks into that Project, and using the Timeline feature of that project. Thus, for now, we’re not really making use of any weighting of hours, etc.

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