Hi, everyone! I’d love to hear examples of how portfolios are being used to help manage your work. I’ve been a daily Asana user for almost two years and portfolios is one of the areas that has left me stumped.
How we’re using them currently is we have one global portfolio (to which we add every single project) and then we monitor employees’ bandwidth by reviewing the Workload tab on a weekly basis with team leads. This has been undeniably helpful! And it’s the main reason why I’d love to see what other advantages portfolios bring to the table.
Outside of our global portfolio, we have a few team-specific portfolios, but similar to the example above, really our only use case is hopping over to the Workload tab to gauge how many hours per week each employee is currently resourced (to ensure no one is expected to work over 40 hours or possibly miss a deadline due to too many tasks/ deliverables to focus on in one week).
What are some ways portfolios have changed the game for y’all? Thanks in advance for all the tips and tricks!
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We only just began using portfolios this summer, but I’m excited about the organization it’s offering my team. We operate on a seasonal basis, so each May/June we start our year over. I’ve created a portfolio for this season which will house projects for the season, and come next season we’ll create a new portfolio.
A little background, I am part of a Creative Services team that provides assets for our marketing department. All assets built by my team are used to promote our business. We create emails, display ads, sponsorship ads, and more for two different products. I have divided the projects by channel so we can track work we do for each and lumped those projects into the portfolio for this season.
Before we were using the same projects year after year, but now we’ll be able to browse past projects while maintaining current projects separately. For example, we used to have a “Creative Requests” board that was a universal board. If someone needed something outside of emails/social posts it was requested via this board. Now I have a board for Sponsorships, Partnerships, Display Ads, Paid Social, etc.
It helps me a lot with tracking and post-season analysis because it helps to break down the projects based on who requested them and when it was requested so we can determine if more help is needed in a particular area.
I also have a portfolio for Blogs. We have an “Unpublished Blogs” board where we have blog concepts and works in progress. Once published we move the boards to a “Published” board, depending on which product they are written for. We also have a board for this season (which also lives in the portfolio for this season as projects can be housed in multiple portfolios if needed). The seasonal board is for blogs that were top performers in the last season so we plan to review them, as well as other blogs that need to be worked on.
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Thank you for sharing, Kelly! I love the idea of creating portfolios on a seasonal basis. A large part of the work we do at the agency I work for is social care (community management) and we definitely have seasons where the work fluctuates based on cultural events/ time of year.
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Hey Jessica, we use it as kind of a table of contents for all our projects. With so many projects, our sidebar and favorites could just overflow. With Portfolios, we can add all our projects that pertain to one team or location, add some custom fields to help with sorting, and VOILA we have an organized listing of every project we are working on. Each week, we all add status updates as well so you can see how all the projects are progressing fairly easily. Hope that helps!
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I love this idea!!! As we scale, I can see needing a centralized place to hop from project to project to view status updates. We have a few departments with 20+ projects and I never thought to create a Portfolio for each department rather than each of our clients. Thank you for this!
Hey @Jessica_Pramanik,
we use portfolios for many topics. Currently I have created a portfolio for us for a big strategy programme.
At the top level, our management sees if everything is going well in the individual action lines.
On the next level down, those responsible for the action lines see whether their projects are running according to plan.
The “nested portfolios” function was helpful here. I love this function. It allows me to create a great reporting for each programme.