Asana Status Updates: How To Effectively Keep Your Team Updated
Asana Has Built-In Status Report Capabilities: You can post and share status updates in Asana, view previous updates in chronological order, use AI to draft your updates, and share them with relevant team members and stakeholders.
Creating Status Updates Doesn't Have To Be A Chore: Set up status update templates in Asana to speed up the process, keep things short and sweet, and only include the key metrics that indicate how the project is going (not everyone needs all the data in your spreadsheet).
Asana Is Best For Internal Communications: If you need to send status updates to external stakeholders as well, it's best to use another platform or format. You can use your Asana update as a starting point, and make edits as needed.
I’ve written hundreds of project status updates in my career as a project manager, and Asana is one of my favorite project management tools to use—I love how easy it is to post visually-appealing and relevant status updates for your team.
This article contains a step-by-step guide on how to post project status updates in Asana and includes 5 tips on how to make those project status updates more effective, to keep everyone in the loop and avoid miscommunications that could derail your project.
Step-By-Step Guide: Posting Project Status Updates In Asana
If you’re new to Asana or haven’t quite gotten the hang of using the Status Update feature, I’ve put together this tutorial just for you.
1. Click “Update status” To Start Drafting Your Status Update
Asana offers an amazing feature (as part of their paid plans) that allows you to easily post and share project status updates with your project team. When you’re viewing the Overview tab of a project, the far right panel will show your project’s updates in chronological order.
You can start drafting a project status update by clicking Update status in the top right corner of the updates panel or by clicking on the project status indicator to the right of the project title towards the top left of the screen.
2. Specify Your Current Project Status From The Drop-Down Menu
Specify the status of your project from the following options: On track, At risk, Off track, On hold, or Complete. There is also the option to draft the update with AI. See below for a helpful reference table that describes examples of when to use each of these.
You may want to talk to your manager or teammates about what they consider At risk and Off track; some teams may already have specific budgetary or timeline requirements for these two statuses that you can use as indicators.
| Status / Selection | Description |
|---|---|
| On track | The project is going well, and all tasks and milestones are on track. There aren’t currently any roadblocks or budgetary concerns. |
| At risk | While the project appears to be going well at a top-level, some aspects have changed that are putting the project at risk. A due date could have been missed, a client may be late sending assets or approvals, or the team may be using up the budget more quickly than was originally planned. |
| Off track | The project isn’t going well. There are overdue tasks, deadlines and milestones are late, and the team has used significantly more of the budget than was originally planned. There may be a major roadblock preventing the team from delivering their work on time. |
| On hold | The project has been put on hold and the team isn’t currently working on it. |
| Complete | All tasks, subtasks, and milestones are checked off, and the project has been fully completed. |
| Draft update with AI | Select this option to have Asana select the status automatically and draft the status update for you, based on the latest project data it can find. You have the option of editing the status update before it gets posted. |
3. Draft Your Project Status Update (And Format It To Your Liking)
Now you can start filling in information for your project status update in Asana! You’ll build your status update in the main content section in the center of the screen. The Build your update panel on the right has two tabs: Previous update and Highlights.
Sometimes it’s helpful to see what you posted in the previous update as you’re typing up your next update, so the Previous update tab conveniently displays the most recent status update.
When you select the Highlights tab within the Build your update panel on the right, there are plenty of highlight modules you can drag over to the content section of your current status update panel to customize your updates.
Using these highlight modules adds a nice visual element to your status updates, and some of the modules can be customized by their own statuses and timeframes.
Modify the title of your update, change and fill in the sections of content for your update, and drag over any built-in highlight modules from the right panel to your liking.
4. Select And Specify Your Recipients
Now’s the time to make sure your status update is going to go to the correct team members. Double check who your status update will be shared with, and make any additions as necessary before posting.
5. Click Post
When you’ve got your project status update ready to go, click the blue Post button in the top right corner of your status update panel.
Don’t worry too much about making a mistake at this point, because you can always edit a status update post after it’s gone live by pulling up the status update, clicking the three dots in the top right corner, and selecting Edit status update.
5 Tips For Making Your Asana Project Updates More Effective
Now you know how to post a project status update in Asana, what about making them more effective and impactful for your team? Read on for some helpful tips.
1. Post Status Updates Consistently
Get your team accustomed to seeing your status updates in Asana at a regular cadence and in the same format. It won’t be very helpful to them if you go weeks without posting or if you use a different format every time.
I suggest using the same status update title convention with a spot to include the date so it’s easy to know when the status update was posted at a glance (here’s an example title: Status Update - 8.21.24).
In my experience the majority of project status updates I’ve posted were a bi-weekly basis and shared on Fridays, but you can work with your project members to determine what’s best for them. Some factors can dictate when the best time is for you to post your updates.
For example, if you need to include budgetary information in your updates and your team enters their weekly time in a time tracking software at the end of each week, it makes more sense for you to post updates on Mondays since you’ll have a better snapshot of their complete time entries by the time you’ll be posting your update.
2. Include The Right Metrics
Every team will have slightly different dynamics and goals that will influence what metrics you may want to include in your status updates.
While you may be tracking all kinds of project management metrics on your own, it doesn’t mean your entire team needs to see your exciting spreadsheet data every time you post a status update.
I think burn rate is one of the most important and helpful metrics you can share with your team. Burn rate tracks how much of a project budget has been used over a specific time period, so what better way to inform your team about how your project’s budget is tracking to its timeline than in regularly posted project status updates?
Your team will be informed early and often about where they’re at with the project budget. No one wants to receive a message out of the blue that says “oops, we’re almost through our entire budget but we’ve only completed 25% of the project’s tasks…”.
3. Templatize To Make It Easier On Yourself
There’s no need to start from scratch every time you need to post a project status update for your team. Once you’ve posted a status update in Asana for a particular project and go to post your next one, Asana will include the same sections you used in your previous update as a starting point.
If you’re including any metrics in your status updates that are tracked somewhere outside of Asana, automate those data pulls if you can to make it easy for yourself each time you need them for a status update.
If you’re including any text that uses specific formatting, you can pull from another document or a previous status update as a starting point. Be ready to copy and paste starting text from your previous or templatized source and make your updates from there. This will save you a little bit of time.
4. Keep It Short And Sweet
Like the rest of your project communications, you should err on the side of keeping your updates as simple and easy to understand as possible, and only include the stuff your team cares about.
Your status updates do not need to be a play-by-play of everything that has happened in the project since your previous update. Include high-level information and flag any potential or actual risks, and let your team know what’s upcoming so they can be informed.
You’re likely already running standup meetings on your projects that verbally inform your team of what’s happening on a regular basis.
Posting brief status updates in Asana is a great way to condense and memorialize what you’ve already talked about in detail with your teams, and by the end of the project you’ll have a paper trail of updates you can historically refer back to if you or your teammates ever need to look back at previous posts.
5. Send It To The Right People
At the beginning of your project, align with your team on who needs to be notified when you post your project updates in Asana and check in occasionally throughout the project if there are any changes.
Management may or may not want to be involved in your regular status updates, so it’s best to confirm ahead of time who should be included outside of your core project team. The last thing you want to do is annoy someone with an extra notification they don’t need in their lives.
Some companies add their clients as guest users in their Asana accounts, so be mindful of the details and information you include in your status updates if you’ll be sharing the updates outside of your internal team.
My personal recommendation is to use Asana for your internal-facing project communication, task tracking, and project updates and to use another platform for sharing stakeholder or client-facing updates. You may need to edit your status updates for an external audience.
What’s Next?
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