What do you do when your Executive team is pushing you to use Asana, but refuses to log-in because it’s too overwhelming? In the October session of Asana Office Hours, we had a few people ask for best practices to provide Executive visibility without them getting too in the weeds.
Telling your CEO, “Just login,” is not going to get you far. It’s important to understand the obstacle so you can offer the right solution.
Common objections
Notification fatigue – They are already bombarded with a million notifications a day, so the last thing they want to do is see more from Asana.
Can’t see the forest for the trees – Your prebuilt dashboard has everything except that one metric your CEO actually cares about.
Struggling to find the right projects to monitor – Your CMO does not want to be wading through your weekly 1:1 to find the status on the campaign dropping this afternoon.
How you can help
Pair back/disable exec notifications
If your executive team is being automatically added to every project and portfolio for visibility, there are probably a few things at play.
1) Project & Portfolio Level Notifications
Until quite recently, new invitees were automatically subscribed to all project notifications when added in Asana. Your CEO does not need to be emailed every time a new task is added to every project.
The good news is: You can fix this for them. Follow the gif below to update the project-level defaults for each project. AND, make sure you keep this unchecked when adding new members.
Deselect the “Tasks Added” for folks not doing the critical work
2) Email Notifications
Your Executive Team probably doesn’t need the same level of notification support as the folks in the weeds of the projects. Suggest they pair back some of the defaults to cut back the noise, limiting it only to tasks assigned to them.
Unfortunately, this one they have to do for themselves – But you could send them a quick 1-pager with a screenshot of which ones they should keep on.
Only select the notifications they need to pay attention to
Lean on Project and Portfolio Status Summaries
Save yourself, and your execs, some time and put project statuses to use.
Don’t rely on the prebuilt Statuses that take you hours to parse through, build the Status Template around exactly what your Exec team needs and wants to see.
Find Status Templates under Agents » More
Build a custom status template based on what your exec team needs
Curate their visibility
Once you have an idea of what the Exec team wants and needs to see (is it a dashboard? Certain milestones? High-level status across projects or initiatives), you can curate to show them just what they need. Here are a few tactics
Create an Exec-Level Portfolio
Group Important Work – Create a custom Portfolio that only shows the important custom fields your Exec team needs to know about.
Gather all relevant projects and portfolios into a curated view
Data-Focused – Build a custom dashboard and set it as the default view for the Exec who just wants to see the numbers.
Set your Custom Dashboard as the default view
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Roll-up Project – Create a curated project view that contains only the important milestones they need to have visibility into.
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Calendar view that contains multi-homed tasks across various Marketing projects
Looking for more ways to learn?
Join my free monthly Asana Office Hours and bring your questions and troublesome workflows! We’ll work through your issues in real time.
What best practices have you implemented at your organization? Share it with the Asana BFF Community in our #resource-drop channel!