New: Organize work at multiple levels of your organization by adding Portfolios to Portfolios

Despite all of the changes to the workplace last year, one thing hasn’t changed—employees are still spending 60% of their time on work about work. These activities, like searching for information or chasing status updates, take time away from meaningful, strategic work that moves your organization forward.

In 2018, we introduced Portfolios to help teams reduce work about work and organize their most important strategic initiatives with project portfolio management. Portfolios are the mission control center for your organization’s most important initiatives and their status. With Portfolios in Asana, you can track all of the information you need to run your business—from strategy to execution—in one place.

Every company has their own organizational structure and information distribution style. To help teams better capture their organizational structure in Asana, you can now add Portfolios—in addition to projects—to Portfolios. Monitor work at the right level, every time.

Capture and view work at the right level

By adding Portfolios to Portfolios, you can better organize and navigate work in Asana. With the flexibility to organize projects and Portfolios side-by-side, ensure every stakeholder is viewing work at the right level, without getting lost in the weeds.

These multiple layers of organization increase cross-functional visibility and make it easy for team members to monitor and communicate about work. For example, here’s how members at different level of your organization might use projects and Portfolios:

• Individual contributors who mainly work out of projects can get more context about work at the portfolio level.

• Team leads and project managers can coordinate work across projects within one portfolio. At the portfolio level, they can see each project’s Status and click into the project for more information, if necessary.

• Department heads can create a portfolio containing any relevant team portfolios or projects. They can get a bird’s-eye view of Status across multiple department initiatives, and develop a cohesive picture of whether the department is on track, at risk, or off track in relation to their main objectives for the quarter.

• Executive leaders can collect all of their direct reports’ portfolios in one place to make sure work is on track across the organization.

💡Tip: Just like adding tasks to multiple projects, add a portfolio to multiple Portfolios to reduce duplicative work.

4 ways to use Portfolios to effectively capture and organize work

With the ability to add Portfolios to Portfolios, you can create an intuitive, navigable, and customizable overview of work. Centralize information at the right level so stakeholders can view work at the level that makes sense for them.

Here are four examples of how you can centralize information and easily create flexible organizational systems:

“In order to track progress in multiple places, I have to manually duplicate work”

If you work on a matrixed department, you need to make sure different leads are able to view work progress as it relates to their vertical or functional level. But instead of duplicating work, you can now put all relevant work into whichever portfolio makes the most sense for you and your leads—without disrupting someone else’s workflow.

Imagine you’ve created a portfolio for a new customer marketing brand campaign. The work for this initiative needs to be tracked in the customer marketing portfolio, which is managed by the customer success department. But you also want to capture this work in the brand team’s portfolio for visibility. Instead of duplicating work, you can add the customer marketing brand campaign portfolio to both the customer marketing portfolio and the brand team’s portfolio. That way, the leads of those two respective departments can keep tabs on work without disrupting each other’s organizational system.

“As a department head, I want a 30,000 foot view”

If you work in a more traditional or hierarchical organization, you can use Portfolios to create as many layers of work as you need. That way, team members can dig deeper or zoom out to understand how the work they’re looking at fits into the bigger picture.

For example, imagine you’re the Head of Revenue Marketing for your organization’s sales department. You want to know, at a high level, if your sales teams are on track or not. Each sales team lead (for example, SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise team leads), have their own Portfolios to track their team’s work. Instead of cycling through each portfolio on a daily or weekly basis to get an updated progress report, you can now create a “Master” sales portfolio that includes each team’s portfolio. If anything is off track, click into that particular division’s portfolio to learn more and help get them back on the right track.

“I want to collect all of our important initiatives in one place”

If you have few or no levels of management, you can also use Portfolios to organize separate streams of work inside a larger portfolio of all of your organization’s initiatives. Keep in mind Portfolios can contain hundreds of projects, so organize them to your heart’s content.

Let’s say you’re the CEO of a startup. Other than working groups and cross-functional initiatives, your organization is flat. But as the CEO, you still need a way to see what everyone is working on. By creating a central portfolio of every initiative’s project or portfolio, you have a central source of truth for all of your organization’s important work.

“I want to consolidate information and personal projects”

Just like projects, you can set Portfolios permissions to private. Put your active projects and Portfolios you frequently access in a single place, consolidate information you want to reference frequently, or create Portfolios to share with a small set of people for specific projects.

Manage and navigate your organization’s work with Portfolios

No matter how you use Asana, with Portfolios, you can monitor multiple initiatives and quickly report on the health of your organization. By creating multiple layers of organization, you can see different levels of work, drill down into what needs attention, and remove extraneous details that can distract you from the big picture.

Portfolios are available to all Asana Business and Enterprise customers. Interested in trying Portfolios? Sign up for a free Business trial to get started today.