Super Admin Ability to Manage All Project Details

There’s a workaround for when an employee is terminated until Asana wakes up and realizes the person who pays for the account should full access to the account.

You log in to the employees’ email, reset their Asana password, and then log in to Asana as the employee.

You shouldn’t have to do this but Asana thinks the users’ privacy is more important than your ability to run your company. Thankfully email providers like Google have a brain when it comes to Super Admin rights and privileges.

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We have three people at our company who are Super-Admins, which includes myself and the business owners.

We have a lot of projects here that we cannot archive. We’re on the teams, and we’re even on the Projects listed as Editors.

But, we cannot archive them. We are the ones who first become aware that a project is ready to be archived. Currently we have to assign a task to whomever the Project Admin is.

Seems to me like a Super-Admin ought to have the right to do this. Sometimes, we have to archive 20 projects or more. Not being able to simply click and archive is exceptionally frustrating.

Honestly there shouldn’t be ANYTHING in Asana for our company that should be off-limits, its the entire point of being a Super-Admin.

Likewise along with that, there should be ways that the Super Admin can do things like place a task (like, a calendar entry) on all projects within the company, such as major holidays, business closed days, etc. Just mentioning it here are part of a Super-Admin discussion but I know it’s been discussed elsewhere also.

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@Matt5 - I’ve merged your post with the existing request thread on this topic. Please consider voting for it with the purple button near the title!

Totally agree! It is a huge issue that a superadmin can’t manage all areas of the work, especially since this is a project management tool and needs to be agile and flexible. Would love an ETA on when this is being addressed!

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I recently removed an employee who left our org from Asana and transferred all of their projects and tasks to their supervisor, but the supervisor cannot delete their old projects. What is the point of transferring ownership if the new owner is stuck with the dead weight? And why is Asana so obsessed with individual privacy, when I think that those policies should be set by the organization using the product? How many of us have workplace policies stating that the company owns all of the information in our apps and workstations? This is pretty standard stuff, right? This thread was started in November 2023. Will Asana take action in less than a year? Please?

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I ran into this issue again and am posting that it is a major grievance, again.

+1 to this thread.
As a Super Admin - should be easy to be able to at least move projects to another team. For instance, we have an ALL USER team just for Training and Tips. Now it is flooded with projects from New Users that forgot to put on the privacy settings and now all employees can see the info… some of those people aren’t in Asana anymore and I have no way of cleaning it up.

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I just ran into this issue. We have a GUEST user that created a project in a certain team, and they are now the sole owner of the project, despite not even being a full user of that team, let alone the org.

Despite me being a Super Admin on the Enterprise org, I can’t even go in and delete that project without reaching out to the GUEST himself? Seems unreasonably restrictive.

@FreshyJon - in the interim for your specific case, I would use a service account and the API (you can use the web-based explorer) to just delete the project. That’s obviously not a real solve for the underlying issue, but it at least gets that done now instead of you having to wait for them to do it.

Nice, we just upgraded to Enterprise and didn’t realize that was a feature. That’ll be useful. Thanks!

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The fact that this issue still exists, really dissuades me from recommending Asana to other organizations that need very streamlined permissions and accountability structures. It’s really a shame this has been brought up so many times without a plan to fix. Just saying.

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Is there any other way to send the message loud and clear that this is a critical feature that needs to be added.

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I’m the IT manager for our non-profit that uses Asana. I recently removed some accounts for people who’ve left the organization. In the process, it prompted me to create a project with their tasks, which I’ve done. Some of those tasks include links to other projects, that (apparently) nobody is now the owner of. I can’t even see what those projects are despite being a super-admin. In something like Google Workspace it’s possible to investigate essentially anything within our organization, but here on Asana, I can’t even review a list of all the projects that exist in the organization, or reassign project ownership in the case of a staff person who has left. Do I have to reactivate their account and go log in as them in order to find stuff and re-assign it? That seem beyond ludicrous. I have to believe I’m simply missing something here. I’d appreciate any suggestions here. This is also important for me to be able to ensure compliance with our data retention policies (which will mean deleting old projects). Thanks.

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Sadly you are not missing something, as super admins in Asana do not really have “super powers”.

Read more: Super Admin Ability to Manage All Project Details

It is not clear to me why Asana is prioritizing the user over the organization.

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@Matthew_Carroll2,

I’ve merged your post into an existing topic where you can click the title to scroll to the top and vote by clicking the purple Vote button.

Thanks,

Larry

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@lpb thanks. I’ve voted for this. Honestly I’m fairly stunned. This to me seems like a really basic requirement for organizational management of data and permissions. For the thousands of dollars we’re paying organizationally a year for our team, I expect as an administrator to actually be able to administer things. I’m not really sure what Asana is thinking. For now I guess I just have to add a convoluted process for off-boarding where I take over someone’s account before deactivating it, log in as them, and manually review projects they are the owner of and transfer things as necessary. That really should be handled by the account removal process, but isn’t. Their tasks get transferred, but any private projects simply get orphaned, along with any unassigned tasks in those projects.

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Yes, until there’s another option, that’s what I recommended here:

Really after a year this post is still active and this feature is still not present? What is in the daily routine of developers in Asana? Just curious, since this software has less capabilities than any other PMS and a lack of OBVIOUS IMPORTANT OPTIONS (like the ability to delete a project if you are a super admin)…

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Matthew I am also deeply disappointed in this feature. When I spoke with support they wanted me to send the url of every single project that was owned by clients who have left the organization so that we could update the owner and make changes to the overview section and other key features of the project. As a super admin we should be able to adjust the ownership of projects on our own, it is insanely inefficient to have to go support every single time we need to change project ownership. When employees leave the company I deactivate their access immediately. I’m not logging in to make adjustments.

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So, how many votes does this feature need in order to be implemented? I agree, we spend too much money not to have full control. My teams are cluttered with useless projects I can’t get rid of, and we’re trying to start fresh with new workflows.

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