Asana enthusiast, get ready for a productivity power-up! This November, Asana unleashes another wave of enhancements designed to streamline your workflow and boost efficiency. First up, Smart chats harness the power of AI, allowing you to generate insightful project visualizations with simple text prompts. Need to track project momentum? Burndown charts clearly show task completion over time, keeping your project on schedule. And for even more tailored insights, custom field rollups let you aggregate data within portfolios in ways never before possible. But that’s not all! Discover other important updates and enhancements below and discover how these updates can elevate your Asna experience.

Smart Charts

Effortlessly visualize your project data with Asana’s new Smart charts! This AI-powered feature takes the complexity out of chart creation. Provide a text description of the insights you need, and Asana will automatically generate the most suitable chart type. Whether you want to see tasks completed over time, upcoming deadlines, workload distribution, or custom field aggregations, Smart will deliver the visualization you need in seconds. This intuitive functionality empowers you to quickly understand project trends, identify potential roadblocks, and keep your work on track without needing to manually configure chart settings. Access this feature by navigating to the dashboard tab on any desired project and commanding AI to create a chart according to your needs.

Burndown charts

Gain a crystal-clear view of your project’s progress with Asana’s new Burndown charts. This powerful visualization tool tracks the number of incomplete tasks over time, giving you an instant snapshot of your team’s momentum. By comparing the total task count against the burndown line, you can easily identify potential delays, predict completion dates, and keep the project on track. Burndown charts promote transparency, enhance data-driven decision-making, and empower your team to proactively address potential roadblocks before they impact your deadlines. This valuable addition to Asana’s reporting toolkit provides the insights you need to ensure successful project delivery.

Custom time units in charts

Asana charts just got a whole lot more flexible! Now, you have the power to customize the time units displayed on your chart’s y-axis. Whether you need to analyze trends by day, week, month, or quarter, this new feature provides the granularity you need to gain deeper insights into your project data. With custom time units, you can tailor your charts to match your specific reporting needs and visualize progress in a way that’s most meaningful to you and your team. This added level of control enhances Asana’s reporting capabilities, allowing for more precise analysis.

Custom field rollups

Asana is enhancing portfolio management with a powerful upgrade to custom field rollups. Now integrated with formula custom fields, rollups provide a more flexible and robust way to aggregate data within your portfolios. This means you can effortlessly summarize numeric data from your projects – such as budget totals, estimated hours, or any other custom field – and display it directly within your portfolio view.  This eliminates the need to navigate between projects, giving you a consolidated overview of key metrics and progress. Existing portfolio rollups will be seamlessly converted to this new format, maintaining your data and providing you with increased functionality. With custom field rollups, you gain a more comprehensive and streamlined view of your portfolio’s performance.

Individual portfolio permissions

This update introduces granular access levels on portfolios, giving you more custom control over who can view, edit, or manage them.  Admins and editors can choose from the following access levels for each portfolio: Viewer, Editor, Admin, and No Access. This means you can confidently share portfolio information with the right people while maintaining control over sensitive data and ensuring that only authorized individuals can make changes to your portfolios.

Table of Contents in Project Notes

You can now add a table of contents to your project notes, making it easier to navigate through long documents and quickly find the information you need. The table of contents dynamically updates based on the headings (H1 and H2) within your notes, ensuring easy navigation and a clear structure for your project documentation.

CSV User Import

This update enables admins and super admins in organizations to efficiently import new members into Asana and update information about existing members in bulk.  The CSV user import functionality streamlines the process of adding or updating users, saving you time and effort compared to manual entry.

Manual Rule Triggers

Asana now supports the ability to manually trigger rules, giving you more control over when your automation runs. This means you can manually initiate rule actions on specific tasks, adapt to process changes, and ensure consistent data across your tasks and projects without needing to wait for certain criteria to be met.

Coupled Triggers and Conditions

This update simplifies the process of creating certain types of rules by reducing the number of setup steps required. Coupled conditions allow triggers and conditions to be optionally coupled, or combined, in certain circumstances, making it easier to create more intuitive rules and streamline your workflows.

Date Actions in Rules

Asana has introduced enhanced date action functionality in rules, offering more flexibility and precision when automating your work. This update allows you to set dates relative to any other date, including custom date fields, and supports negative offsets for setting due dates in the past, providing greater control over project timelines and task dependencies.

Mobile Home Weekly Project Progress Widget (Android)

This new widget for Android users provides a quick overview of your tasks in a specific project right from your home screen. This allows you to stay on top of your work and see your progress at a glance without needing to open the Asana app, promoting better task management and awareness of upcoming deadlines.

Mobile Home Goals Widget (iOS)

This new widget for iOS users lets you monitor team and organizational goals directly from your home screen. This helps you stay aligned with your team’s objectives and track progress towards your goals without needing to open the Asana app, fostering a sense of shared purpose and progress visibility.