Hi all! My team and I are doing some exploratory research on improving the landing page on the admin console to accommodate for some changes coming soon! I wanted to understand how folks are using the admin console today. If you go into the admin console, can you help us out by answering any or all of the questions below?
How many times a week are you going to the admin console?
What do you usually do in the admin console?
Do you ever have trouble finding what you need in the admin console? If so, what do you do to find out what you need?
What do you spend a lot of time doing in the admin console that you would rather not spend time doing?’
What information do you find missing in the admin console?
Thank you for taking the time to read this! Please let me know if you have any other thoughts about the admin console I didn’t cover above.
How many times a week are you going to the admin console?
Probably 2-3 times a week.
What do you usually do in the admin console?
I’m usually in the admin console to quickly adjust a user’s team access, invite new users, set and clean up job titles and departments, or look into AI credit usage.
Do you ever have trouble finding what you need in the admin console? If so, what do you do to find out what you need?
No, generally it’s user friendly.
What do you spend a lot of time doing in the admin console that you would rather not spend time doing?
Nothing I can think of.
What information do you find missing in the admin console?
I wish there was greater control over teams, projects, etc. within the admin console. To be able to view projects that team members are owners or project admins of, ability to delete trash or abandoned projects as a super admin.
@Elaine_Winde I love that you are looking at the admin console! One of the things that can be more robust is activities taken by users in Asana. Right now, the only thing that’s populated is last login, but that could have been to view something or whatever. It doesn’t state what actions were taken, so even quantity of actions taken when they logged in or length of time that they were in, things like that, would be very helpful in that reporting, especially for new organizations and seeing how people are adopting Asana.
Another enhancement, since it’s getting such high usage, is maybe having a separate menu item just for AI usage so it’s easier to get to and see what’s happening with the credit usage.
Thank you for reaching out to the community and asking what we need for this!
Hi @AnAsanaUser ! You aren’t able to see this in the admin console, but if you visit a specific user’s page, you see all the projects they are part of. Is this what you’re referring to?
Hi @Elaine_Winde - sorry to take so long to reply! Thanks for getting back to me. Apologies for the long reply.
I tried to find a ‘user page’ but I couldn’t in either the admin console or the desktop app for projects. The closest I could get was seeing a list of teams a user is part of.
In any case, this isn’t quite the feature I was thinking about. I’m thinking about something similar to groups in MSFT Entra, for example. A kind of granular access management GUI for various objects in the Work Graph. I wouldn’t disagree that it is already doable for indiviual teams/projects/portfolios/goals - I have no problem managing user access to each of those one by one. But when you think about managing access to many of those objects at a time (or even just visualising who access to them), things get harder.
For example, if I wanted to add multiple users to several goals at once, I currently have to go through each goal’s permission settings and add each user individually. I understand that I could assign users to teams and assign teams to goals (in this example) to minimse the clicks, but there still isn’t a way to assign (or remove) a team to (or from) several goals at once. If removing a team from a goal, I’d currently have to somehow remember that the team had access to it. I believe that currently you can only group goals by accountable team or owner in the desktop app interface. There isn’t a convenient way to see a list of goals by filtering for privacy permission/access settings.
Another example would be removing a user (or team) from multiple projects at once. It’s the same issue - I have to go into each project individually. At least with projects it is possible to go into ‘All Work’ for a team and see what projects the team has access to. The same isn’t true of portfolios or goals.
An extreme (and slightly silly!) example would be to think about removing many collaborators from many tasks at once. Currently, you’d have to just know which tasks have a collaborator you want removed and then go to each task separately and remove the collaborator. This would be incredibly time-consuming without some sort of overview where you could bulk-select and -edit.
I think the Work Graph is a great idea! However, implementing a cross-functional (inherently many-to-many?) data model does suggest a need for admins to have greater visualisation and control of how the various objects in the model are connected to each other. I flag this particuarly re managing access permissions for users/teams.
The Teamless Projects thread was what started me thinking about this. I don’t think my suggestion necessarily overlaps with the queries therein, but the thread does highlight how changes deriving from the Work Graph model will require new ways of thinking about how to manage interconnected objects.
Thank you for the reply! That’s very a very interesting take. Is it a bigger problem that you are having a hard time visualizing it to understand what is going on in your company? Or is a larger problem that you are spending a lot of time re-shifting goals/projects/etc?
I think the problem starts with visualisation, which this thread discusses somewhat.
But without the ability to edit access permissions and object relationships at scale as an admin, visualisation is only half the battle. I’d prefer robust admin controls over pretty visuals with limited functionality.
For example, the Project Browser view discussed in the Teamless Projects thread is not as helpful as that thread attempts to suggest. You cannot modify teams or portfolios associated with projects in that list view without going into each project individually. It’s a helpful visual for locating projects, but missing useful features as an admin tool.
The Work Graph gives users lots of flexibility to implement different ways of organising their work. You can easily end up with many groups of objects and layered access/permission pathways that aren’t always clear to visualise or manage. A way of overseeing that web is something I think the admin console would benefit from.
