2 reasons to manage multiple projects with Portfolios in Asana

Spending too much time tracking down projects updates? Is the information incomplete or quickly outdated? It can be difficult to monitor project progress if you have to search in multiple places and don’t have the visibility you need, especially when you’re managing or tracking multiple projects without effective project portfolio management.

Instead, you can organize your important projects into larger initiatives all in one place with our new Portfolios feature. Think of it as the mission control for your important work—whether you’re running a company, department, program, or team.

At Asana, our marketing department uses Portfolios to organize all of our projects by key initiative so they’re easier to manage and we can see how work ladders up. Here are the benefits we’ve experienced as a result:

Save time by organizing team initiatives in one place

When you’re overseeing large initiatives for your team or department, like our marketing program leads do, it can be time consuming to find the information you need and keep it organized. But because Portfolios are built on top of project work you’re already managing in Asana, you don’t have to use another tool to organize your initiatives or manually collect project updates.

“I love that Portfolios allow me to holistically track what’s going on at any given time.”

You can create a portfolio to track any collection of projects you’d like—from company objectives and team initiatives to product launches and marketing campaigns. After you create a portfolio, just add existing projects in Asana to organize them and get a high-level overview of progress in one place. And since Portfolios are also available in our mobile apps, you can check in and manage your initiatives from anywhere.

In our own marketing department, each program lead has created a portfolio for the big strategic initiative they’re overseeing. For instance, we have a portfolio for growing our customer base, which includes projects for brand campaigns, social media acquisition, events, and more. By grouping all of the related projects together, they’re now organized and easier to find. Plus, this helps us ensure we’re focused on projects for strategic initiatives and not just “doing projects to do them,” which saves everyone time :+1:.

Get a holistic view of how multiple projects are progressing

Once you’ve organized your projects into portfolios, you’ll see additional details for each project like status, task progress, priority, project dates, and the project owner. With the addition of this structured data, you’ll have a better idea of how all the work for a big initiative is progressing. You can also add custom fields for other information you want to track for each project like budget, channel, or location.

“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.”

Since our marketing department groups projects in portfolios for each of our key strategies, we can quickly get a high-level overview of all the work being done to support each initiative and how they’re tracking. To capture more context, we also added custom fields to each portfolio, including the specific team (i.e. content, product marketing, acquisitions, etc.), channel, and budget. This has increased alignment across our department because everyone has visibility into the work each team is contributing to our strategic initiatives, and people can filter the portfolio view based on their needs.

Start managing your initiatives with Portfolios

While keeping track of multiple projects and managing initiatives isn’t easy, we hope Portfolios save you precious time by keeping everything organized and providing a high-level progress overview in one place.

Now that you can manage your initiatives in one place, it’s time to monitor progress and drill in if anything’s at risk so you can keep projects on track.

If you’re on an Asana Business or Enterprise plan, you can start using Portfolios 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.