Introducing Portfolios: The mission control for your most important initiatives

Earlier this year we shared our vision for the future of Asana, which will help your organization move quickly and adapt to change so you have more time for the work that matters. Your team will spend less time coordinating and more time focused on the work that makes an impact. Everyone will have clarity about your team’s objectives, the plan to achieve them, and who is responsible for each piece of work.

Today, we’re excited to introduce the next suite of features that will help your organization get closer to that vision, starting with Portfolios.

Monitor initiatives across your company with Portfolios in Asana

Portfolios in Asana introduce a new way to run your portfolio management processes in Asana. Now, you can monitor the progress of your important initiatives and company objectives in one place. It’s the mission control for everything you need to track in your organization—from strategy to execution. Portfolios build on tasks and projects, the foundation of Asana, so it’s clear who is responsible for each piece of work, when it’s due, and how it ladders up to strategic goals.

Organize your initiatives in one place

Creating and achieving company goals is crucial, yet for many teams there’s no way to see how you’re progressing towards them because your work isn’t being tracked in the same place as your strategy. As a result, you create your initiatives and have no way of tracking their status. Now with Portfolios, you can monitor progress towards these objectives in real time to keep work on track.

You can organize your portfolios any way that makes sense to you, your team, and your organization. Create a portfolio for company objectives, team initiatives or campaigns, and then add custom fields for the stage, budget, or any other data unique to your team. You can then sort and view the projects within your portfolio in any way you need.

We’re able to keep track of each piece of work in one place and have more time to focus on being creative.”

Monitor progress in real time

When you have real-time visibility into how work is progressing, you can spot and fix issues before they derail your initiatives. Instead of manually piecing together status reports that are time-consuming, quickly outdated, and don’t allow you to make informed adjustments to your plans, Portfolios provide constant insight.

Portfolios gives me a quick overview of all projects I’m overseeing (over 70 of them!). I’m now able to stay aware of the status of projects and review things quickly at a high level. They’ve replaced my PowerPoint slides and are much more efficient!”

Mollie Ramage, the Senior Director of Finance and Continuous Improvement at AB-inBev, needs to track the experience at over 70 craft breweries across the United States. Portfolios give her a heat map of how each brewery is doing so she knows where to focus her attention. She can then sort these projects by status, and drill into specific projects that are off track so the team at headquarters can jump in and help where needed.

Share Portfolios to keep your team updated

Your teammates and leaders want to know how work is progressing, and you want to make sure all the pieces are moving forward efficiently. With Portfolios, you can eliminate the manual work of searching, tracking, and piecing together information and status updates, and instead spend more time doing your job. Whether you go through your marketing campaign portfolio at your weekly team meeting or share your team initiatives portfolio with leadership, everyone will know how work is progressing, what needs attention, and any changes to plans in real time.

Portfolios is a game changer for us—it’s exactly what our Directors and VP’s need in order to get an overview of all our teams projects. In addition to keeping our leadership team updated by sharing Portfolios, we use them in our status meetings to keep our team in sync. It’s magical.”

Ways to use Portfolios

Here are a few ways you can start using Portfolios today, both in our web and mobile apps:

Company objectives: Track your objectives in a Portfolio and keep your entire company updated on progress. Add the projects where work is already happening so everyone can understand what’s going well and what needs more attention. Then add custom fields for the department responsible and project priority so you can sort and understand where more resources are needed.

Product launches: New product launches require a lot of cross-functional coordination and collaboration. Each team is likely working out of their own project, but the success of the launch depends on everyone completing their part. Add each team’s project for the launch into a portfolio so marketing, sales, product, engineering, and customer operations all have a single source of truth for progress. Add a custom field for stage, with values for ready to start, in progress, or approved so you know where work stands.

Team initiatives: Keep your entire team updated and focused by creating a portfolio for your priority projects. Instead of building a presentation to share with executives or review in your next team meeting, simply pull up your portfolio to see what projects are on track, what needs attention, and where you need to adjust plans.

Workload (coming soon)

Coming in early 2019, you’ll also be able to manage your team’s workload right in Asana. We’ve reimagined traditional resource management to focus on people, so you can plan and optimize your team’s schedule and bandwidth, and ensure the right people are working on the right projects.

Unlike traditional approaches which are manual and require another tool that’s not connected to your work, Workload capitalizes on the work already being done and recognizes teammates’ unique skill sets and schedules, so you can easily reallocate resources as project plans change.

Portfolios and Workload are available in Asana Business

Today, Portfolios are available in a new plan, Asana Business. The Business plan is designed to be your mission control for work happening across multiple projects, teams, and even your entire company. It will help you know where your business stands in real time so you can make informed decisions faster. Workload will also be available in Asana Business once it’s available in early 2019.

We’re excited to see all the great things your team will accomplish with Portfolios. To learn more, please contact our sales team.