We’re dealing with a particular snafu in advance of our go-live date next week that I have talked through with the Asana support team, but have yet to find a solid solution to.
Use Case Part 1
We want clients to have access to view project progress and to get notifications each time we update them via the “Progress” and "calendar views in Asana. In order to do this, it would appear we have to give them access to the entire project since we can not restrict them to JUST the “Progress” tab.
Use Case Part 2
We DO NOT want clients to have access to sensitive comments/conversations that take place within the project on different items (not to mention other data). Some things are better off on a “need to know” basis.
There is the option to copy & paste updates and email to the client, but that is time-consuming and we’re trying to avoid it. There is also the option to utilize the slack integration, but we find that unsatisfactory as well because of how overwhelming and chaotic the conversation can become in a chatbox.
Is there a way to seamlessly update the client with notifications without giving them FULL access to everything happening in our projects? Any advice is hugely appreciated.
What did the support team suggest to you and in what way did it not meet your needs?
I suggest that you create an additional Asana project for clients to view. The project can contain all the tasks you’d like to share, but leave out all the restricted tasks that you want to keep confidential. In this case you’ll multi home selected tasks from your restricted project into the new client project, to keep clients informed where required. Whenever you provide an update in the restricted project, you can simply copy/paste the update to the client project and/or modify it as needed.
Thank you for replying thoroughly. The service team (Brandon & Gearoid) met my needs. They did an excellent job responding thoughtfully to all inquiries.
The solution offered here sounds like more of a workaround and creates a lot of duplicative copy/paste work for our PMs, which is frankly what we were hoping to avoid. We would like to give access to just the progress reports so that our PMs can update once weekly (R/Y/G progress report, remaining tasks, Instagantt snapshot link) and have everything automate from there (via email notification to the client).
The other solution could be to restrict what guests can see on a more granular level when they are added to a project (i.e. they can see tasks, calendars, progress, etc., but not conversations or assignees). That way we could invite them to the entire project, but control what they see.
If these features do not exist, we understand and have been otherwise thrilled with Asana, but would like to put in a feature request. Is there anything in the works to add either of these features?
Glad to hear that the support team was able to help you. I hear you on the desire to reduce duplicative work. At this point I think the workaround with an open project and a restricted project is your best bet.
We’re not able to provide specific updates on the product roadmap, but the team at Asana is definitely hearing these requests for more detailed permissions. If you’re interested in submitting feedback that goes directly to the product team, I recommend that you vote for existing threads that resonate with you in the #productfeedback area of the Community, or feel free to start a new feedback thread.
We have the same challenge. We do not want to give clients access as our projects are large and may be overwhelming and also there is a privacy issue as you can see anyone’s email if you @ mention or change the assignee…
So we are copy pasting the progress into an email to send clients an update on their implementation progress. Often valuable information is detailed in the Description - specific notes to client and we would like to be able to easily add to the progress. We are on Premier account.
@anon43454736, If you haven’t considered it already, what about using a progress-only project and share that one with clients and use it for Progress/Status only? Could that eliminate the copy/paste?
Thanks heaps Larry
we do over 100 implementations a month… so that would create additional work for our consultants… unless you have some other ideas. Til recently we also had an issue that we could see private/guest users email addresses, can’t see that now… which is great… Any suggestion to improve the flow would be much apprecited.
So you have a hundred projects per month? I didn’t expect so many. To properly help, I’d need to know more about the environment.
But had you considered just adding a single task to the project and making the client a collaborator on that task (and not as project member)? That would hide the project complexity and narrow visibility for the client to a single task. If you’re using the Project tab you’d still have to copy/paste but within Asana at least. Unless you used this one task (or one task per week, say) as the sole place for client status.
Thanks Larry… still working out the privacy part…
We have important description info in the task… and my original plan always been to be able to share tasks or projects with clients… depend on the size of the client… The challenge is that we have around 280 task in a template (project) and we would not do too well to force client to learn another software (Asana) to use while they are learning ours… I am sure we will work it out as we use it more and more. Just other pm systems… only shows the actual project members when re-assigning tasks… or @mention… unfortunately Asana shows the entire organisation database full name and email. So a few challenges to get through… and we are working on those… thanks kindly again Larry.
We use Asana2Go to generate reports on an as-needed basis. It’s not an automated process but it saves us a lot of time and can generate and send a report in a couple minutes.
Asana2Go comes with a bunch of good templates you can play with or you can create your own.
we are using it now as well… and made one of the templates branded and reformatted a bit… and looking great… it would be amazing to be able to attach it back with a click of a button to the project as a progress update :). Thanks everyone