Project Overview / Description

Hi Asana,

I am evaluating Asana as our PM tool of choice at the moment (free account currently) and one thing that we need that I believe is missing is the ability to add custom fields into the actual description of the project overview.

I know that when you are under a premium account you can add custom fields to tasks, but what about project description/overview?

For example, our projects are more physical deployments and there are a various factors our sales and support team need to see at a glance, like contractors being used, installation dates, products sold, warranties, etc… Is there somewhere that we can put this information that is easy to find upon clicking on a particular project?

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@Brock_Pinnington, Asana’s built-in solution is Portfolios, a Business or Enterprise tier only feature: How to Get Started With Asana Portfolios | Product Guide • Asana Product Guide

But there are solutions that don’t require Business/Enterprise but still let you track projects and custom fields for them. One of my solutions for this uses Asana2Go and is described in the article and video here:

Other solutions I have implemented for clients don’t require Asana2Go and can incorporate Timelines, which isn’t possible in Portfolios.

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Hi Brock and welcome to the forum! We are currently on a Business account with a small team. Even though the projects have a space for the description we don’t find it easy to access or use. Instead we have created, as part of our conventions and etiquette, that projects contains a PROJECT PURPOSE/DESCRIPTION section at the top of the page. We just use a task section to create a space for us to put all of the necessary information that we need to complete the project (i.e. files, purpose, description, etc). It works well because we know where we can find all of the information that we need for any project before we get started. You may want to consider adopting a similar convention if you go with Asana. We have built out numerous templates for our work, which all contain a task or section at the top for pertinent information as well as a close out section at the bottom so we are archive documents and consistently closing jobs and rescheduling ones in Asana.

I hope this helps,
Katie

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@lpb thank you for your response, Asana2Go looks good as a an overview of the data that is already in each project, but what I’m talking about is extending the project description box to be able to be split up into sections. Say, Project Overview (brief description of the project), related documents/files, contractors/installers, warranty details, support details, etc.

@Katie_Reynolds thank you for your suggestion, I was toying around with this yesterday and created a header section with a number of tasks, it’s not the perfect solution but definitely works well for our use case - sounds like you have a similar need. Thank you!

I am assuming we can lock these tasks when we upgrade? Can I make it so only the project owner can edit the tasks (but other collaborators can add to them?)

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Hi Brock,

If you were to be on a paid subscription you would have the ability to create templates where you could build out a section. A template is a project that is also designated as a template, so when you create a new project instead of copying an existing one you can select from your templates. We have these sections in all of our templates so it’s easy to create and build out our new jobs. The permissions are typically based on the project rather than the task, unless the task does not live within a project. You can set permissions of a whole project where users can edit or read only. I’m not sure that you can do that on tasks within a project though. Here are some links that talk about permissions. Maybe someone else can chime in regarding that.

Katie

@Brock_Pinnington, As @Katie_Reynolds points out, you won’t be able to “lock” those tasks as you want to make them different from other tasks’ permissions.

Re the Project Description, I often use rich text like boldface and bullets to create the sections you need.