I know on “Progress” a start date can be entered, but we wish to have a task marked as a Milestone to have both a start and end date. This would be big for us and I’d assume others, and I’m not sure why this feature was removed from what a task can track?
Hi @dean.clough,
You’re correct when you say that is not possible to set a start date in Milestones. Only due date is an option in Milestones at this time.
Thanks for sharing this feature request with us!
1 Like
I think of a Milestone as achieving a goal by a certain date. How Asana has implemented a Milestone without a start date and how it’s represented on the Timeline lines up with that thinking.
If you had Milestone start dates, how would you use them?
1 Like
Hi Vince - thanks for the feedback and your points are valid. But we are a consultancy, and our particular client (and management) wants an answer to the question “when is the work on this milestone starting”?
We’ve worked around it by establishing a Milestone for the project start, but it’s not ideal.
1 Like
I was guessing that is what you were hoping for and was going to suggest the same workaround you are already using.
To add a little more to the workaround of a start and end Milestone, you can mark the end Milestone as dependent on the start Milestone.
I would also suggest using names for your Asana Milestones like the following: START Phase 1 and END Phase 1.
I know having a date range for Milestones would be super helpful for my team. The project of note is one where I am tracking our 3 year Product and Program calendar. I’d like to track important steps for each Product or Program to show overlap but I’d like to mark the big events (program dates, product launches, etc) as Milestones so they show as more important aspects of the larger timeline.
4 Likes
In our case the milestone is an event. We are often preparing for a conference that lasts a few days and think of that as a milestone.
4 Likes
Similar to Chris, we are using milestones as an event that occurs over a few days. I hope that this update can be made in the future!
1 Like
My team also uses milestones for “go live” dates or “flight dates”. This is specifically useful for events or marketing tactics that have flight dates over several weeks like an email nurture campaign or social paid ads. My team uses the milestones so when we roll projects into a Portfolio we can use the timeline view as an integrated marketing calendar without duplicating efforts and updating in multiple places. Milestones having a start date would be so invaluable right now so we can actually see date ranges represented in an integrated view.
1 Like
I would also like to have a milestone start date to identify when the team starts work toward a particular milestone.
Currently, in one type of Asana project I set up to view a large project over time, to make projections as well as tracking progress. I use milestones to track product features. I use Sections to identify the two-week sprint the feature will be completed in, and the due date for when the feature will be released in to Production. So, for me, the section (i.e., the Y axis on the timeline) shows when the development work is done. There may be a gap between that and the Release Date during which the feature can undergo User Acceptance Testing, and we can fix bugs, before the Release.
Some features require less testing, a smaller interval, which makes the timeline look a little funny. Some milestones appear farther down and farther to the left because we complete the work in a later sprint, but release them earlier. Adding a start date on the X axis would show how work on the features overlaps, and it would be more intuitive to the team what’s going on with those features.
1 Like
HI
ALL mIle stones start somewhere and fin shish some where… also majority of them start date OR due date depends on the the previous Mile stone has been reached.
Agree it would be helpful.
Thanks
+1 Please!
I would like to use milestones to track events across multiple days so that we can easily identify them on the status page, list, and calendar view.
I prefer not to create multiple milestones for each event to show that it is across several days because someone can mistakenly think they are different events or duplicated events.
I’m currently entering the events as “tasks” to use the date range and show that it is one event, but it looks cluttered.
I was just very confused that I couldn’t set a date range for my tasks. Actually, the way we use milestones is to visually separate groups of tasks for different platforms from the actual platform-specific tasks. E.g. we have a milestone named “Add new feature X” and this has two subtasks “[Android] Add new feature X” and “[iOS] Add new feature X”. Thus, for us a “Milestone” is not at all different from a “Task”, therefore I just got really confused. Thankfully, I’ve found out about this feature only missing from Milestone (it’s available for both Tasks and Projects) and I can’t understand at all, why specifically this level (for me Milestones stand between Tasks & Projects, they’re like “Group of Tasks”) does not have date range support.
Agreed. We also have multi-day events as milestones and would appreciate having the date range available.
This is another way that milestones are really not useful for product, even though asana recommends them (Sub Task Due Dates in Calendar and List? - #38 by Lauren_Briskin1) is another). If you can’t attach a start date for a milestone in order for it to show up on a product roadmap calendar, it loses a lot of functionality.
Agreed! We use milestones to designate a critical piece of a project is completed. That critical piece has a start date when we begin working on it and we’d like to be able to capture that full timeline. This is a major pain point in asana for our company!
Yup! I also would love a start date option for a milestone as I use it to mark them as a type of work that I need to inform partners of and sometimes this work goes over a period of days
Also chiming in here. Give us the flexibility and let us decide how to use the due dates. For us milestone represent goals are targets for a period of time. Having the start date let’s us know when the goal period has begun.
We also use Milestones as the big primary event dates that our entire project revolves around. Start date would be super helpful.
1 Like
I just up-voted this as well! We are using milestones to denotes phases of projects so that it shows up in our portfolio view. This would be super helpful!
1 Like