Project dashboards

Dashboards are project-level tabs containing graphs and visualizations that let you zoom out from the day to day to quickly understand your team’s progress. These charts help to instantly identify potential blockers in your team’s work and move the project forward.

The Dashboard tab is a good reference point for finding data to get a quick pulse on the progress of the project.

 

How to Access:

• From your chosen project, click the Dashboard tab.

You may have to click on More to access your dashboard, depending on your screen/window size.

Components

The charts in dashboards will auto-populate when you first land on the tab. You can also add customized charts and numeric roll-ups. Dashboards will automatically update every time you visit the tab or refresh the page, so you know the information is always up to date.

Types of charts

Column chart

Incomplete tasks by section.

You can:

• View task count by section to understand where potential bottlenecks are in your team's process.
• You can swap in any of your custom fields to see the project status and where there are blockers.

Donut chart

Task count by completion status.

Here you can:

• Get a quick pulse on how big each of your work slices is. For example, are your incomplete tasks a tiny or large piece of the pie?
• Visually represent tasks by completion status or tasks by section custom field by swapping out one for the other or clicking the Pencil icon to customize your chart.

Assignee chart

Task count by assignee.

You can:

• Understand how work is distributed across your team. At a quick glance, you can gauge who is performing and who might be overloaded.
• Click the Pencil icon to customize your chart.

If you hover over the assignee lollipop, you can see how many tasks they have upcoming.

Burnup chart

Task completion over an amount of time.

This chart helps you track your team’s velocity over time and how quickly your team is completing work.

Line chart

Line charts help you illustrate trends over time and understand which processes are more effective within your team. Line charts can help teams standardize processes and share best practices.

Number custom field sum

You can add a number field to your project to see its value in this chart.

Enhance your data report with a sum total of your existing numeric custom fields in a particular project. Whatever your individual custom fields are, they will populate the chart to create a roll-up summary. You can also click the Pencil icon to customize your chart.

We can sum up any of your numeric custom fields across the project. We recommend using this chart when comparing estimates to actuals, such as budget to actual costs, or if you want to quickly sum up the hours your team has spent on the project.

If you have numeric custom fields, we will automatically pull those onto the dashboard.

Adding customizable charts or numeric roll-ups

Group or filter data by assignee, custom field, task type, completion, status, or date. You can layer multiple filters to get detailed insights and add custom titles to your charts.

When creating a new chart, you can choose between Column, Line, Burnup, Donut, Lollipop, or Number.

To add your chart or numeric roll-up, click the Add chart button.

There’s a limit of 20 items that can be added to your dashboard.

From the next window, you can customize your chart or numeric roll-up.

You must add a title to your chart before saving.

Editing a chart

When editing a chart, you can:

• Choose the format of the chart (donut, column, lollipop, line, burnup) or numeric roll-up.
• Decide if you want to show or hide data labels on your chart by toggling on or off. 
• Decide how to group your chart data (x-axis). For example, by assignee, creator, enum custom field, section, task type, completion status, task status (upcoming, overdue, complete, unscheduled), and time period. Note that the time period filter is available on Asana Advanced, and the legacy tier Business.
• Choose how to measure your data ( y-axis). For example, time to complete, count of tasks, or sum/average of numeric custom fields as a measure on charts and roll-ups. Donut charts cannot use average as their measure since the numbers need to be parts of a whole.
• Layer filters on a single chart or numeric roll-up. For example, assignee, single select custom field option, section, task type, completion status, task status (upcoming, overdue, unscheduled), date filters. Within relative date ranges, you can also select which date (creation, completion, due) you want to use. These are chart-specific, not dashboard-specific filters.

How to edit your chart

To edit your chart, click on the Pencil icon next to the selected chart.

From the next window, you can customize your chart to your specifications.

When you’ve finished making your edits, click Save.

Reordering your charts

You can reorder the layout of your charts using the drag and drop feature.

How to expand your chart view

Click the expand icon to display more data and view your chart in a larger format.

Chart actions

You can export each one of the charts to an image (png) individually. You cannot export the whole dashboard as one.

If you want to add charts to your status update, download the chart and simply add it as an attachment in the status builder. You can then drag it into an email, a Slack message, or a presentation slide to report on team progress.

How to customize your chart by color

Color customizing charts and graphs can help you instantly identify and differentiate any potential road blockers for your team at a glance. Applying a unique color to different charts helps to visually represent tasks by completion status or tasks by section custom fields. Custom colors can be pulled in for both filtered and grouped charts.

How to edit your chart

1. Click on the Pencil icon next to the selected chart.
2. Select your desired color using the color picker and click Save

Number custom field colors

To keep colors based on number custom fields, select the grey ("none") color in the upper left hand corner of the color picker.

If you choose to group by custom field, we will automatically set the chart's color to none to ensure that you see the custom field colors first.

Use cases

Dashboards display key performance indicators relating to specific projects. It can display metrics for a project's overall performance and progress or highlight particular problems that require further attention.

Offering visual data in your reports makes it easier for your audience to quickly grasp the information presented and then consider the outcomes from that data.

Use these features to :

• Monitor the work of one or more projects and identify constraints or roadblocks
• Track progress against goals and report the status to senior leadership
• Distill the biggest pain points into a problem statement/visual for stakeholders
• Gain valuable insights into your projects
• Bring data to life and be ahead of the curve
• Get a complete overview of project trajectory

By using these charts to report, you are :

• Driving & simplifying workflow
• Being accountable and giving clarity
• Turning your data into actionable insights
• Sending a more impactful message more quickly