Project Reporting & L0-L4 Tasks level

Hi Everyone, I hope you are well.

My organisation has set up a PMO and I been tasked with creating guidances around project reporting and the L0-L4 Milestones/tasks. It would be great to hear about your ideas or your current practices around this area.

Currently, I have two options that might work:

Option 1)
L4 Tasks = Task level in Sections in Projects in Asana
L3 Tasks = Section level in Projects in Asana
L2 Tasks = Project level in Asana
L1 Tasks / Milestone = Portfolio level in Asana
L0 Milestone = Portfolio of Portfolio in Asana

Advantages = Narrative and Dashboard will work really well as it gives transparency of all the completed / incomplete tasks in the project level and portfolio level.

Disadvantages = Portfolio of Portfolio doesn’t work well (Portfolio of Portfolio doesn’t allow timeline view, progress and milestones can’t be presented), and normally these goes to Senior management, hence a separate reporting system might be required.

Option 2)
L4 Tasks = Sub-Task level in Task in Sections in Projects in Asana
L3 Tasks = Task level in Sections in Projects in Asana
L2 Tasks = Section level in Projects in Asana
L1 Tasks = Project level in Asana
L0 Tasks / Milestone = Portfolio level in Asana

Advantages = The Portfolio can be used to report to the senior management without using another manual system

Disadvantages: The dashboard will not show the completed/incomplete sub-tasks which makes the project completion artificially low as the dashboard will only show L3 tasks ( A lot of the sub-tasks might already be completed but the dashboard will still show that it is completed. This led to the the low percentage completion in the portfolio view.)

Any other suggestions or thoughts? This is greatly appreciated!


With regards to Risks & Issues, any suggestions on how to report those within the status reporting?
I normally create a section within projects to track them, but I have to manually type them out for the status reporting as there is no drag on the right hand side for tasks within a section / with a certain filter so it would be great to see if there is any other more efficient suggestion.

Thanks!

Welcome, @anon91957007,

I don’t believe it’s possible to fully answer a question like this in the abstract without knowing the nature and size of the projects and the makeup of their work.

I attempted to provide guidelines and approaches to the best I can in my article:

so perhaps this may be of some value to you in arriving at an eventual solution.

Larry

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Thanks @lpb. This is very interesting and very helpful.

Yes one of the biggest challenge to provide guidance within this space is that the projects/programmes are of very different length, complexity and size (and some cross-functional) across the organisation and to find an one size fits all would be very difficult.

It would only be a general guidance to aid in their reporting using Asana reporting functionalities such as Project Status Reports and the Portfolios view. I am thinking that most of the senior stakeholders within the org would only look at the portfolio view, hence I would like to make that as accurate as possible. Option 1 might be better in that sense IMO.

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incompleted**