Project Management: Asana 2021 Updates

As we can all feel, 2020 has brought many challenges and opportunities to each of us personally and to our work teams.  With the increase in the number and scope of the projects impacting campus each month, we need to make sure that each project member and leadership are aligned with the vision, milestones and progress of each project.  

The IT Division has been using Asana to develop, track and inform leadership and project members on hundreds of projects over the past 6 years.  The Asana platform is updated each month to make it a more powerful project management tool.  Here is a brief list of the recent updates to Asana over the past three months.

Grid view on My Tasks: The new grid view on My Tasks keeps your task details organized so you can focus on what needs to be done. Learn how to use My Tasks to stay organized.

Goal history: View a history of changes to your team’s Goals in Asana. Learn all about Goals in Asana.

Dashboard improvements: Drill down to specific slices of data in dashboard charts just by clicking, and open dashboard charts in lightbox to see more data up close. 

Introducing Project Overview: The new Project Overview tab gives your team one central location to set context, create shared norms, and publish project status updates.

Project Brief: Within Project Overview, you can add a Project Brief -- a multimedia document that serves as a detailed single source of truth about the what and why of the work. 

Messages: Messages enable you to communicate within Asana with your colleagues and easily link to relevant work. You can send messages with any combination of individuals, teams, and projects. Messages replaces the former Conversations feature.

Nested Portfolios: Now you can add a Portfolio to a Portfolio, allowing you to monitor work across multiple levels of your team’s information hierarchy.

App Rules: Add app-related actions to your existing Rule triggers and actions (e.g. when a task is completed, send a message to a Slack channel). Find pre-set suggestions in the Rules Gallery or build your own. Get started with Rules 

Goals Hierarchy: Expand and view up to 4 layers of Goals hierarchy from your organization or any team’s Goals page.  Get Started with Goals

Task templates: Now you can create task templates to standardize common tasks within a project. Add subtasks and relative due dates to make kicking off new work easier than ever.

Project Dashboard improvements: Add new charts and apply new filters and customization to the existing charts in your project Dashboards.

View projects in My Tasks on iOS: Get more context on tasks in your My Tasks by viewing each task’s projects field in your My Tasks list view on iOS.