Hey Asana users! Asana’s July 2024 update is a game-changer, boosting team productivity and collaboration to new heights. From AI-powered smart summaries for portfolios to streamlined project creation, Asana is revolutionizing how teams work together. With enhanced Goals featuring visual progress tracking, workflow bundles for standardized processes, and smart digest for efficient project management, Asana’s latest features empower teams to achieve more. Don’t miss out on these exciting updates to transform your team’s workflow.

• Smart projects

Asana introduces Smart Projects, an AI-powered tool designed to streamline project creation. It combats “writer’s block” by using AI to generate project outlines, complete with relevant sections and tasks, based on your input. This feature aims to save time and ensure no crucial steps are missed during project setup.

• Smart Goals

Smart Goals is a powered feature to enhance goal-setting. It guides users in writing effective goals based on best practices, ensuring clarity and achievability.  This streamlines the goal-setting process and aligns teams towards successful outcomes. Additionally, Smart Goals provides AI-generate summaries for portfolios. These summaries offer a quick overview of portfolio performance, highlighting key changes and facilitating informed decision-making. This time-saving feature keeps teams updated and fosters efficient project management within Asana.

• Smart Summaries on Portfolio

Another AI-powered feature of Asana is the Smart Summaries, designed to streamline project management and enhance team collaboration. Smart Summaries Automatically generate a concise overview of projects and portfolios, highlighting key changes, milestones, and actionable insights. This eliminates the need for manual updates and time-consuming status meetings, allowing teams to quickly get up to speed and make informed decisions.

Smart Summaries are particularly beneficial for executives and stakeholders who require a high-level overview of multiple projects without delving into the minutiae. Additionally, team members who are returning from hiatus or joining a project midway can effortlessly catch up on the latest developments.

• Custom Fields Access Control

Asana introduced more granular permissions for custom fields in July, granting users finer control over project data. This update allows admins to designate who can edit field details and settings, choosing between “Field admin,” “Editor,” and “User” roles. This change enhances collaboration and data security by ensuring that only authorized personnel can modify critical project information.  It’s a significant step towards a more customizable and secure project management experience within Asana.

• Data labels on charts

This enhancement allows you to display or hide numerical values directly on your chart data points. By enabling data labels, you can instantly gain deeper insights into the precise figures represented by each point, bar, or line on your chart. This eliminates the need for guesswork or manual calculations when interpreting your data visualizations, making your dashboards more informative and actionable.

• Portfolio PDF export

Portfolio PDF Export is a feature enabling users to generate comprehensive summaries of their portfolios in a presentable PDF format. This simplifies the sharing of project progress and key information with stakeholders who may not use Asana.

The exported PFD includes an overview of the portfolio’s status, progress on individual, projects, and relevant custom fields. This allows for easy sharing of project updates, performance reports, or executive summaries without requiring recipients to have an Asana account.

• Duplicate Form to a new project

Duplicate form to new project allows you to easily copy an existing form to a different project, eliminating the need to recreate it from scratch. This is particularly useful for standardized processes or when gathering similar information across multiple projects.

The duplicated form retains all original fields, questions, and settings, ensuring consistency. This streamlines your workflow allowing you to focus on collecting and analyzing data rather than building repetitive forms.  While this feature doesn’t allow direct transfer between existing projects, it significantly improves efficiency when setting up new projects requiring similar data input.

• Duplicate section to other project

Asana allows you to duplicate sections into other projects. To do this, navigate to the section you wish to duplicate and hover over to the section name. Click the three-dot icon and select “Duplicate section” from the drop-down menu. Choose the project you want to duplicate the section into, and select the task details you wish to preserve, such as assignee or subtasks. Click “Create new section” to perform the duplication.

• Duplicate allocations on capacity plans

Duplicate allocation on the capacity plan is now available in Asana. This streamlines resource management by allowing users to quickly replicate existing allocations, eliminating the need for manual recreation for multiple team members. This time-saving feature enhances efficiency when allocating resources across projects. It ensures consistency in workload distribution and simplifies planning processes, enabling project managers to optimize team productivity and meet deadlines effectively.

• Updated project details panel

This month, Asana revamped the project detail panel which provides a centralized view of essential project information, including goals, milestones, and project briefs. It streamlines project management by making critical details easily accessible.

Additionally, the update introduces new features like the ability to add custom fields to the project details panel. This allows for tailored tracking of project-specific data. Project managers can now have a more comprehensive overview and better control over their projects within Asana.

• Prefix improvements for ID custom fields

Asana enhances ID custom fields by introducing prefix improvements. This means you can now create numbers and up to 20 characters more meaningful and organized task IDs.

The improvements allow for better customization and flexibility when generating unique identifiers for tasks, ultimately improving workflow efficiency and task management within Asana.

• Click to highlight text

Asana’s July update introduces a convenient “Click to Highlight Text” feature. This streamlines text formatting within tasks, comments, and project descriptions. Simply click and drag the handle to select and apply the desired formatting like bold, italics, or headings.

This enhancement boosts productivity by making text formatting intuitive and efficient. No more time wasted on manual formatting – quickly highlight key points and organize information for improved clarity and collaboration.