Speaker 1: If you've ever caught yourself wondering how you can get a realistic view of not just the tasks your team is working on, but on how much of their time is being allocated to those tasks, then this video is for you. I'm going to show you how to use Asana's workload and portfolio features to gain the visibility into your team's work that you've been missing. We'll also take a quick look at Asana's time tracking feature and how that can shed some light into your estimates and your resource management. Let's set the stage here quickly for you. So I've got this project set up. Today we're building a website. I don't build websites anymore. That was in my marketing days, but I've got some just quick tasks here on under copy, on design. You've got some technical setup stuff here. We're using some custom fields just to set the status of work, whether it's in progress, not started, waiting. We've got some assignees and some roles here and some due dates. So given ourselves about three months here to complete this project, so you'll see the timeline spread out over those three months. So as you can see, work has been allocated, assignees have been assigned, and due dates have been assigned as well. So what I often see is that people aren't taking the time to set up their custom fields properly. And so what's happening is that they're trying to get a view of resource management. And resource management is a topic that comes up quite often. And the problem is that as your team scales, the complexity of your project management also scales and doesn't always scale at the same rate. So the ability to see the workload and capacity of your team is needed. So you can understand who is working on what, who's overloaded and who you can allocate more work to, to support the team. So once you have this simple system set up, the one I'm going to show you today, you'll be able to do better estimating and reporting around your projects and tasks. And if you haven't yet subscribed to this channel, please hit that subscribe button, hit the notification so you never miss a video. Let's jump in. So let's get back to our project here. So again, using proper custom fields is going to mean everything. So oftentimes I'll see people using the estimated hours. That was a custom field that, you know, that's all we really had at one point in Asana. So we put in our estimated hours, we'd fill that in and you know, we could, you know, have fun like that. And that's how we were setting up our portfolios as well. But with the new time tracking feature within Asana, it's not here in this project. Let's go to another one. And we need to add that to. Asana is begging you to use this new feature. They want you to add this custom field. So when you click on this, if you haven't seen it yet, it's automatically going to add this new estimated time and actual time custom fields to your projects. And you'll see that in the portfolio as well. It's also begging you to use these features. And so if we get back here, I'm just going to fill in some of this information really quick. So I'm actually going to get rid of this old custom field because we don't need it anymore. It's going to remove it from the project. And I'm just going to fill in some estimated time here. So it's going to take us two hours, four hours. There we go. Real simple. Let's just check out our other project. I also created this dummy project so we can see on a timeline in portfolios what this can look like. So again, we've got the old estimated hours here. Let's just update this. So I'm going to get my five hours there, one hour, two hours. Let's just do a bunch of random stuff here. Let's make these all one hour for the sake of time. Not one minute. There we go. So we've got some time. Same people have been assigned these tasks. So first off, what you want to do is you want to go to your portfolio. So I've already set this up for us. We've got a creative portfolio here. And you'll see the projects that I've added are our website design demo project, and then our marketing campaign launch, which is the other project. This is not going to be a video on portfolios today. That will be for another time. But what I've done just to kind of give you a preview of what could be possible is now with the time tracking, we can set up reports and we can set up budgets within our portfolio. And every week our project managers can now take a look and see exactly how we're doing, how we're doing against our budget and our time allocation. So what I'm going to do now is go over to the workload. And as we can see, this is typically what it looks like. We're viewing either all tasks. So if you're using workload for the first time, you're going to come in and it's going to default to your task count. So it's going to see that Amy, who's got one task on this day, daily capacity is one task because nothing's been set from an effort perspective. So if this is your first time, you're going to see task count there. It's important you set up your effort that you're going to be measuring this by. So estimated hours is our initial option. But if we remember, that is our old way of tracking time. We're now using estimated time and actual time, not to be confused with estimated hours and actual hours. So that's the difference. So I'm going to go in here. I'm going to hit edit effort. And there it is. Again, Asana is calling it out for us. We're going to click on estimated time and then we're going to click next. And it's going to add it to our creative production portfolio. So I'm going to add that effort. And if you haven't already, what this will do is all of the projects within your portfolio will automatically add the estimated time and actual time to those projects within that. So let me know how we're doing so far. Leave me a comment and let me know, have you set up your portfolios like this? Has this been a struggle for you? I'd love to know what your experience has been with portfolios so far. So now we can set our capacity. This will range depending on your team. We can set like 35 hours for the week as a standard. And then as we know, we can go in and we can change the individual time as well. If we have some people that are working half time or contract basis, we can update these things here. So I'm going to bring some of these folks down to like really low hours for the week, just so we can switch it up a little bit because everyone is a little bit different. There we go. Now we're going to set this capacity and you'll see automatically it's going to update everything. So if you rewind a little bit, you'll see that the hills and these peaks and valleys have changed quite a little bit because now we are measuring by estimated time. So if we go in, we can see that Amy has been assigned this task. Let's just click on it and we can see what it is. So this is defined website structure and hierarchy. The due date is March 31st and it's going to take her two hours. But as Amy actually dug into this, she's realizing it's going to take a lot longer and I'm going to have to start sooner on this. So I'm actually going to set a start date of the 21st of March to give us some time and rather than the original estimated time, maybe we understood that in a stand-up meeting or as she was actually going through it looking at the resources, maybe there were some blockers. This is actually going to take us 10 hours now. There we go. And what's nice about the time tracking as I'm just kind of going back and forth here is Amy can actually start this timer now as she's working on this. And every time that she comes back to the task, she can restart that timer. So it's going to be less than a minute here. It's not actually going to track anything. So I'm going to add the actual time and let's just say Amy worked on this for two hours. Okay, there we go. Or in this case, Jamie worked on it for two hours. So as Amy was coming in here, we can add manual time here as well on another day or later that day worked on it for another hour and 15 minutes. There we go. And then we can also come back in obviously and start that timer and then it's going to add up all of that time for us, which is really, really helpful. So we've updated the timeframe here and maybe let's just push this way over just for fun. This is going to take us 30 hours. And so if we remember what our capacity was set at, this would change depending on the person. But now we have this task. Amy's daily capacity is seven hours. And in the day, this task is going to take her three hours and 20 minutes, which is fine right now because she's under capacity. She can do that. But what if we start adding more tasks to Amy's plate? What if we take all this work that's been assigned to Charlotte and we start adding it all up into this one section? So we're going to take this website, launch all this information, and we're going to move it right up here. Who else can we take? We can take from Jamie maybe. And this would never happen because they are different roles, but we can obviously take all this information and now we can move it around. And so as you're updating these things, let's see. There we go. Update them. But now let's move them back in time. Let's move this one over here. We're going to see what's going to start to happen. And obviously, there's no way Amy can take care of all this work now. Amy's daily capacity of seven hasn't changed, but the workload for that day has changed. So now she's got eight hours and 20 minutes of time that she's got to complete these tasks. And obviously, that's not realistic for anyone. So this is really the power and the flexibility of workload and capacity is now we can get a really good understanding of this. And project managers, we can do this from the portfolio level. Some people may find it easier to do it at the project level. If you don't say have access to the portfolio, you can make all those updates and changes right here. So let's take it a step further. We've got all this information in here now. We can see that realistic view. This was the original timeline that I showed. We can see the projects are a little bit overlapping, but now let's dig into the dashboard. So by default, portfolios is going to bring in all of your total tasks, the completed tasks, incomplete, overdue, and give you some nice graphs here, which can be updated and edited as you need it. But what I want to take a look at here is how we can report on this information. So what's really nice about this is you can obviously get a different view by looking at different charts. If you want to see a number to represent how much time has been estimated over a certain time frame, we can do that. I like the column in this case because what I want to see is the estimated time by assignee. So we can see that Amy's got a day and three hours of work. And so if we're looking at this, not over the course of three months, but over the course of the next week, we can see, all right, Amy's got 17 hours of work to do this week. So Amy's pretty much at capacity. We obviously have to balance her time a little bit more as we saw on the workload chart, but this gives us a really, really nice view into what's happening. So let's go back to our three months. So now we can see that this associate's got nine hours. This associate's got eight hours over this time. And as these change, project managers, you can come in and you can put on whatever you want to. So on the X-axis, I made the assignee what I'm looking at here, but we can really do anything. We can make it be the creator. We can pull it in by project. We can look at task status. Now we can look at the completion status and we can obviously update the time period of that. It's super important that when you are setting this up, let's actually go and do that. So I'm going to add a chart here and I'm going to make it a column. Again, we're going to set up our X-axis as assignee, or you can keep it as project. It's totally up to you. We can set the custom fields, whatever we want. Just depends on what we're really looking at here. And then on the Y-axis, I want to look at the time entry. So in this case, I want to go estimated time and that's how we're getting that information. What we would do on the other side is, as you can see, the actual time. So we want to set a chart for the actual time that's been tracked. So if you recall, when I started that timer on Amy's tasks, it's taking that summary of those tasks. That's why Amy's the only one here. So as people start tracking timer, either manually or they are pressing that start timer button, it's all going to get updated here. And we're, again, looking for the sum of this. And then we are looking to, let's say, if we want to look at this over a certain amount of days. So the due date, again, is within the next three months because that was the project timeline. There we go. And we can create that chart as well. And then we can move these around. So now this makes your status updates that much better. If you are looking at reporting and you are the project manager, you can come in now. You can set your status by clicking on status update. Now you can look and see what the estimated time was for the project. You can do your calculations because we don't have formulas yet inside of Asana. They are coming. I've heard they are coming. And now we can see how we're doing against our budget. So we have our hourlies, we have our actuals, and now we can actually set the budget to see if we're on track on whatnot. So hope you found this helpful. Like this video. Leave me a comment. Let me know if this was helpful. If you have a question specific to your use case, I'm happy to help them. And I've actually created a space where we can do that. We can ask questions. We can be in community. So to learn more about how Asana can better work for you, join what we're calling the System Builder Academy. It's a community we've created on Circle where I'm taking your questions and I can provide you with additional learning resources. We're doing weekly office hours. There are courses on there, exclusive content, and lots more. So if you're loving the content you're seeing here, if you've been a longtime subscriber, thank you so much. We are taking the conversation into a place where we can just talk more about Asana, learn, and share. And my goal is really to teach you everything that I know about Asana and answer your questions. So head over to systembuilderacademy.com to register your free account and join the new Asana community. The link will also be in the description below. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.