The Asana charts are one of the reasons why Asana is the leading project management software. Charts provide a quick preview of a team’s work. As a result, a supervisor can see all completed tasks, incomplete tasks, incomplete tasks by section, and upcoming tasks by assignee, and more. All action begins in the Universal Reporting area. Read this blog to discover the Universal Reporting area and charts that Asana customers love to use to make data-driven decisions.

Know The Real-time Insights and Universal Reporting

The one feature in Asana that makes real-time updates possible is Universal Reporting. It allows supervisors to gain insights into their team’s work to know what they need to do next. Via Universal Reporting, therefore, you can discover and solve problems before they get serious. For instance, you can reassign work, increase the budget for a team, or get a quick headcount of who is present and who is absent.

Asana allows the creation of dashboards for each project. Each project-level dashboard contains graphs and charts that improve visualization. With these charts, you can spot potential issues affecting your team’s work and remove them. Dashboards in Asana are reliable reference points when you want data about your team’s progress. When you open your Dashboard tab, the chart will fill itself automatically. However, the Asana system allows users to add custom charts.

7 Asana Charts and Universal Reporting to Use for Real-time Insights

In the Asana project management tool, the Universal reporting feature is under Reporting. As long as you are a premium plan user, you can access it. With this feature, you can translate and present data in charts and graphs. Users of Asana regularly use seven charts to explore their teams’ progress from all directions. With real-time information from teams, projects, and departments, users can make dashboards with accurate charts. The top seven charts users use for tracking progress include:

• Task status chart

With the task status chart, you can track the status of events, brand campaigns, IT tickets, and sales support tickets. The Y-axis will show the task count, while the X-axis will reveal upcoming, overdue, unscheduled, and completed tasks. The task status chart also presents filters, allowing you to track your team’s work before you get surprises.

• Estimated hours chart

This chart shows estimated hours on the Y-axis and different workers that make up a team on the X-axis. It presents a clear picture of the estimated workload for one week, two weeks, or any other period that users may choose. It is essential to know your team’s workload for a stipulated period to make other vital decisions. For instance, you might have to add more members to the team to cover for absentees. Also, you may have to reassign work or extend its deadline to prevent your team members from experiencing exhaustion and stress. Fatigue and stress can cause low productivity.

• Requesting teams chart

A pie chart presentation of incoming requests is easy to read, understand, and channel resources where they can make a difference. Teams will make requests based on the type of incoming work they are receiving. When you track requests information live, you can decide on the teams that need resources quickly and which ones can wait a while. In summary, the requests pie chart helps users anticipate their teams’ needs based on incoming projects.

• Workflow stages chart

Teams have to work on projects in phases. The team performance in every stage can help determine the project’s result. So when users want to know what is happening in each stage of a long project, they use a workflow stages chart. It shows projects waiting to enter the draft phase, those in the draft, those in review, those waiting to publish, and the published projects. Thus, you can eliminate anything that is preventing the progress of a project. Also, you can make quick decisions to address potential risks and problems. There will be warnings telling you that your team might not tackle the work in the current stage with the set deadline. So you can shift the due date to help your team finish everything in time.

• Stay on budget chart

When managing a team project in Asana, you will have to deal with budgeting and other things. Once you create a budget plan, you have to monitor your teams closely to make sure they are sticking to it. You can do so with the stay on the budget chart. It will reveal your quarterly budget for an ad campaign or another project. Also, it will show the actual expenditure for the same quarter to help you do the math. Are your team members spending more money than you budgeted initially?

The chart will reveal this data so clearly. It can be disappointing to realize that your actual expenditures went over your initial budget when a team project ends. Asana’s stay on the budget chart can monitor your budgets and produce regular updates on your expenses across all projects. You can then determine how much money you can reallocate to another project.

• Priority of tasks chart

Although you have to motivate your team to work on every project, sometimes you have to prioritize work. If your workers spend a whole quarter working on low to medium priority work, you might have to rush to finish high priority work. Due to the rush, staff can create errors that would affect the quality of the outcome. To avoid a situation like this, you can use a priority of tasks chart. It is a pie chart that will display low-priority, medium-priority, and high priority work in different colors. When you study this pie chart, you can see how much high-priority work you have pending and assign to the whole team or a section of the team. This particular chart can help you complete high-impact work before a quarter ends.

• Open cases chart

When working inside a team, issues will keep on rising as you work. If your project tracks issues in tickets, you need to keep the number of open tickets low. The only way to achieve this is to check the open cases chart often to see the pending tickets. Then, reorganize your team to resolve the cases and reduce the number of open tickets. You can even prioritize resolution based on the departments that have many open tickets.

 Adding a chart to an old dashboard

If you have an existing dashboard and would like to add a chart to it, the process is easy. Go to the Dashboard and click on Add Chart. There is a template library with preset charts. So you can choose a chart from there or create your own custom products by hitting Add chart. After this, you will see the Select Project stage and you can progress from there.

Editing a chart

As well as creating a chart, you can edit it; and, the process is easy. You need to choose the format of the chart you want. Formats include the donut, lollipop, bar, or column. You can also select the numeric roll-up format. Next, determine how you should group your chart data. Will you place it on the X-axis by assignee, section, task type, completion status, or task status?

Decide what you want to measure on the Y-axis. If so, you can use various parameters, including the sum of estimated task hours or counts of tasks. Choose your filters on each chart or a numeric roll-up. These can be date filters, task status, task type, and completion status, and so on. And when editing a chart, you should use the Pencil icon that appears next to a selected chart. Ensure that you save each edit.

Other things you can do to charts

It is possible to manipulate asana charts in different ways. Other than adding a chart and editing a chart, you can also reorder your charts. In this case, you need to alter the layout of charts with the drag and drop feature. Another thing you can do is to expand your chart’s format so that it can appear large. There is an expand icon you can click to be able to view more data in a chart.

Thirdly, you can export a chart to an image. The supported image format is PNG, and you can export each chart separately. If you want a chart for your status builder, you can download it and then adding it as an attachment. From there, drag the attachment into an email or a slide for the presentation. Again, you can remove a chart by clicking on the three-dot icon to view Remove Chart.

Benefits of using charts

When you choose to use Asana charts, you can simplify and drive your workflows. Again, you can hold a team member accountable for their actions if they are derailing group activities. Besides, you can make data presentation clear, and convert your data into insights that people can act upon. When there are things blocking groups’ progress, supervisors can address them right away. Charts are excellent visualization tools that can help your team move ahead of the curve. When you study an overview of a project curve, you can make decisions that ensure its success.

Conclusion

Are you looking to use Asana as your project planner? If yes, you now know seven types of charts most users love to use when tracking their teams’ work status. These charts can show estimated weekly workloads and the hours needed to complete them.

You can also preview your budgets, workflows stages, plan reports, and requests charts any time you want. Now it is upon you to use Charts effectively to have maximum success with Asana. Again a bit of technical knowledge requires to use these charts. If you are completely new then get started with our Asana guide to have an in-depth knowledge of this project management tool.