Here at our facility we’re working hard to use Workload in Asana to our benefit.
I’ve run into a snag however. Please note that I’m only just now beginning to get the hang of what Portfolios do and what Workload is capable of.
So, in our facility, we don’t necessarily assign tasks to a certain person, but in real life it’s more like we assign them to a Department (CNC Machining, Hand-Processing, Prep, Paint, Assembly, Prestage, Loading, Install).
What I have been using in the past (and currently) is a Project for each one of those departments that they keep up on a big screen monitor so they can see their daily tasks and what’s coming up. CNC has it’s own project, Prep has it’s own, Paint has it’s own, and so forth. All tasks show up there for them to do.
I really, really need to be able to see Workload on a department by department basis. And, each department has different maximum hours per week I can schedule. CNC only has 36, but Paint has upwards of 150.
So, how do I set this up? Am I going to have to set this up by giving each department it’s own Asana account so it can be an assignee? I really don’t care to pay for yet another user when it’s someone that doesn’t exist.
I cannot use the Department managers as the assignee here at all because many department may fall under one manager. And, those managers already have enough tasks in their task list, they don’t need the daily production tasks thrown in there as well.
@Matt5 - Are you basically looking for a departmental count of tasks per time period? Do you need any other information (e.g., effort)? Do you need to see this is one view?
If you’re already grouping tasks into their projects, you could just use a dashboard and have charts that count tasks grouped by project. If you need the day-over-day granularity that a workload report provides, you could set up a portfolio for each department and use the portfolio’s workload view. Downsides of this are: your plan may have limits on # of portfolios, you won’t see everything in one place (separate workload for each department).
I’m not interested in task count, that’s somewhat irrelevant because some tasks are a 15 minute thing, and other tasks could be literally 145 labor hours. It’s the “Estimated Time” field I’m really needing to see on a daily basis.
I don’t really mind having to jump from one Portfolio to another to see daily workloads. It would be nice to see them all on one screen but not an absolute.
We are on Business level so I’m not sure how many I’m limited to, I haven’t looked into that.
I will play around tomorrow with Dashboard and Workflow options to see what I can get.
@Matt5 were you able find a solution that worked for you? Curious to apply the same for my team as I have multiple members on the team that aren’t asana members and it isn’t the best of their time to project manage.