2 reasons to share your portfolios

If you’re managing an initiative or overseeing a team delivering multiple projects, it can be time-consuming to create status reports to share with leadership and teammates. Information is scattered in different places, updates are submitted in different formats, and key project details are often missing. Once you do finally create the report, the information is likely outdated because work continued while you pulled together the details. You need project portfolio management.

Now with Portfolios in Asana, the manual work of pulling together project status data is already done for you. In one view, you can quickly see a high-level view of the latest project updates and sort and filter them by custom fields so you have an up-to-date report at all times.

In addition to using portfolios to organize our projects into strategic initiatives and monitor their progress in real time, the marketing team at Asana uses the share function to report up to leadership and keep our entire team aligned. Here are some of the benefits we’ve experienced, along with a few other reasons to share your portfolios:

Report on project statuses to leadership in real time

When you needed to share a status update for your initiative, program, or team’s projects, it used to take a lot of time to manually create a report with all of the important information. But now with Portfolios in Asana, you can easily share reports with leadership in real time (no manual work required :+1:) because the project and task data is already being tracked in Asana.

“Portfolios give a bird’s eye view of project statuses and updates for everyone.” -Jaime Anstee, Manager, Senior Strategist, Wikimedia Foundation

After you’ve created a portfolio for the group of projects you want to monitor together, you can share it with leadership so they can see how those projects are progressing in real time, whenever they want. After they access the portfolio once, it will appear under the Recent portfolios section of the Portfolios index page in Asana.

Additional reasons to share your portfolios with leadership:

• Highlight the great work your team is doing: A portfolio is a great way to highlight all of the projects your team is working on, especially when everything is on track.
• Flag when you need more resources: If your team is stretched too thin, your portfolio can help highlight to leadership why you need additional resources to get projects back on track.

Because our marketing department uses Portfolios to manage our key initiatives, we’re able to report on progress to our head of business, sales, product, people ops, and others in real time. For example, we have a lead generation initiative that is critical for our sales team’s success. Now that we’ve shared our portfolio for this initiative with our head of sales, he can see the status of all the projects we’re executing, like webinars and content campaigns, to generate marketing-qualified leads for his team without needing to request a report.

Keep your team aligned on the progress of your initiatives

It can be easy to get caught up in your own to-do list when you can’t easily see what other teammates are working on. To ensure everyone stays updated, teams usually hold frequent meetings or ping individuals  for updates to share with the broader team. Both activities take time away from doing more strategic work and mentoring your direct reports.

Now with Portfolios, you can organize and monitor all of your team’s important projects in one portfolio and then share it with them. This way, everyone can stay aligned on priorities and progress. You can then use your team meetings to focus on actionable discussions about at-risk or blocked projects, competing priorities, or shifting resources instead of status updates. Plus, when your team can see the impact of their work and how it ladders up to key strategies and objectives, they’re likely to have higher job satisfaction and stay with the company longer.

“Portfolios make it easier to keep track of my team and where they are with their work. I love being able to see everything at a glance.” – Chelsea, SEO Strategy Manager, Reunion Marketing

During our monthly marketing team meetings, we review each portfolio to discuss progress, at-risk or blocked projects, and next steps to either adjust scope or resources. We also use Conversations in Asana to share each portfolio with the entire Marketing team so everyone has visibility into the status of our strategic initiatives, but can review the information on their own time.

Share your portfolios to keep everyone on the same page

Instead of manually pulling together information from different places and project managers to report on the progress of key initiatives, Portfolios in Asana do the work for you. Now you can share useful reports with stakeholders and teammates built from actual project data you’re tracking in Asana.

If you’re on an Asana Business or Enterprise plan, you can start managing your initiatives with Portfolios and share them with your teammates today (just click on Portfolios in the sidebar).

If you’re using the Premium or free version of Asana, upgrade to Business or chat with our sales team to learn more about Portfolios.