I can’t for the life of me figure out why there’s a limit to 500 projects in a portfolio. This just doesn’t scale well. We’re trying to use Portfolios to give us a wholistic view of how all projects are doing, which ones were completed and we need to see all customers/projects. The problem is we have thousands of projects and the cap is 500 projects per portfolio. We thought about using one portfolio for active projects, but that doesn’t even work because we’re > 500 so it forces us to create multiple portfolios by alphabet (or something). This means we lose the portfolio view with all of the columns in one view! Now we have to look at multiple portfolios to see all of the projects.
What is going on here? Why would you limit this to 500?!
Most tools have technical limits because code doesn’t scale indefinitely. For example a portfolio has a workload tab attached to it, so the more projects you put in, the more server power it requires to build a workload. Same thing goes for dashboards.
In this specific case, until very recently portfolios didn’t have any filter available so it just did not make a lot of sense UX wise to have a list of hundreds of projects, because I assume Asana assumed no one would actually scroll that list…
Would you mind elaborate on your use case? Do you scroll the list during meetings?
The use case is I’m trying to get off of Smartsheets. We have one spreadsheet which has a row for each customer and project. In this view, we can see what the overall status is, when the go-live is, comments, when the SOW expires, etc. This view is shared across multiple teams who need to see how a customer is doing with their project. So they open this sheet up, scroll to the customer, and can see exactly the status. The challenge I have with Asana is now I would need to break this up into multiple portfolios. The other challenge I have is even if we ran a report to pull data from multiple portfolios I couldn’t create one view with all of the data/columns they need to see. yes, we could have a dashboard with roll-ups, but really to see the 20-30 columns with different project details would require them to open multiple portfolios.
A workaround (pros and cons) would be to use an Asana project, not portfolio, for your list.
Make each customer/project a task in this Asana project and you are not constrained by the 500 limit. Use custom fields in the project instead of custom fields in the portfolio.
Hope that helps in you didn’t already consider the option,
What we’ve decided to do is have one portfolio for active projects and then create a separate archive for each letter in the alphabet. This allows the team to focus on the active projects and once they close or the SOW ends the project is effectively archived to the portfolio with the first character of the customer name.
It’s not great, but it does allow us some reporting across these portfolios, and having the one portfolio with only active projects keeps the team focused. The reason we stayed with portfolios is we need the task assignment and project tracking piece of Asana.
I still think the limit is something that needs to be fixed. I understand performance considerations, but this is why you can do tabbing at the bottom of the browser.