Introducing Workload: your window into team capacity across projects

Behind every successful business initiative is a team of people. They’re the ones who carry out the day-to-day tasks that propel your projects forward and enable your organization to achieve its mission-critical objectives.

To help your team move quickly and focus on the most impactful work, we shared our vision for the future of Asana last year. In the fall, we introduced Portfolios in Asana Business as the next step towards our vision. And today we’re excited to bring you another step closer with the launch of Workload.

Workload gives you a centralized view of your team’s capacity, making it easier to create a resource management plan and rebalance work so that no one is overworked (or underworked) and to ensure that your most important projects and initiatives are completed on time. With Workload, you never lose sight of your most valuable resource: your team members.

Get visibility into your team’s workload

To understand what their team is working on at any given time, most managers rely on a sprawling combination of spreadsheets, documents, and in-person meetings. By the time they’ve gathered enough information to form a clear picture of people’s workloads, it’s already out of date.

In Asana, Workload does the work for you. It gives you a real-time overview of how everyone is staffed across projects within your team. This way, you know who’s working on what—any day of the week.

In some cases, you may be managing team members in different offices or relying on support from people who don’t report directly to you. Without a full picture of everyone’s priorities, people are more likely to work in silos. Instead, build a Portfolio of projects across offices and cross-functional partners and use Workload to see what everyone is working on—no matter where they are—in one place.

Our Corporate Marketing team receives thousands of requests each year. Before Workload, there wasn’t a way to see all of the work assigned to each person in one place. ”

Asana Tip: With Filtering, you can see Workload by role and home in on specific team members.

Rebalance work, so your team doesn’t burn out

Team members perform at their best when they have just the right amount of work on their plates. For managers, making sure that no one is overloaded (which can lead to work falling through the cracks or worse, burnout) or underutilized (which can turn into disengagement) is one of the toughest parts of the job.

Workload makes the job easier with its visual capacity trendline. Based on task count, it helps you quickly determine who has too much work (or too little). So if you notice that one of your team members is overloaded, you can see who else has bandwidth in the weeks and months ahead and easily drag and drop tasks to reschedule or reassign them. With Workload, you get a complete picture of your team’s capacity, so you can make decisions about rebalancing work with confidence.

Asana Tip: Adding a start date and end date to every task helps ensure that work is measured appropriately in Workload.

Task count is one way to measure team capacity, but it isn’t the only one. Every team has unique needs and determines capacity using different metrics. This is why we’re excited to share that our product team is currently hard at work building custom effort features into Workload. Coming soon, this will let you choose the best method for measuring capacity on your team, whether it’s based on hours or points.

Now with Workload we can see each designer’s bandwidth in one view so we know who has capacity to take on new requests and who is overloaded so we can make adjustments. ”

No matter your team’s function, having visibility into the work happening across people, projects, and teams is essential to doing your job effectively as a manager. Here are three ways that team leads can use Workload:

• Creative production: Make Workload your one stop shop for your team’s intake projects so you can determine capacity for new requests and plan ahead for upcoming work.

• Marketing campaigns: Get a real-time snapshot of who’s working on which of your top marketing initiatives. This way, you can celebrate and share the standout work your team is delivering.

• Business operations: Create a centralized location for cross-functional projects that require your team’s time, so you can see if you have enough headcount for cross-team initiatives.

For more ways to use Workload, visit our Guide.

Get started with Workload today

If you’re already an Asana Business customer, you can start using Workload—along with Portfolios—today. Together, Workload and Portfolios give you a suite of features to plan, monitor, and manage work happening across all your initiatives and teams—so you can accomplish your most ambitious goals together. If you’re not on a Business plan and would like to learn more, sign up for a free Business Trial or talk to our sales team.