Announcing milestones!

Hi folks,

I’m Victoria from the Product Marketing team, and I’m excited to announce that you can now add milestones to your projects in Asana!

These new visual indicators mark important points in your project so everyone stays aligned on progress. They’re also a great way to keep your team motivated with small wins throughout the execution process. You can begin adding milestones to your projects in Asana today if you’re on one of our paid plans.

We know many of you have requested milestones in the Forum, and hope they help you better plan and manage your projects in Asana. To learn how to use milestones, check out this blog post about Asana milestones.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment below.

Have a great day!

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Hello, can milestones be added to list mode projects only or board projects as well?

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Will Milestones be added to Advanced Search or is ability to search for them something that can be done now.

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Hey @Patrick_EMIN, thanks for the great question!

Milestones can currently only be created in List Projects. However, you can convert a Task which lives in a Board Project into a Milestone through the “Mark as Milestone” option in the Task drop-down.

Alternatively, you could also multi-home Milestones into a Board Project to see them there!

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Right and a converted task is no longer considered as a task is it? Is a milestone a different object?

Hello @James_Carl, thanks for your feedback here :smile:

I’ve passed this information along to the team and this insight will definitely help us iterate in the future. Thank you so much again!

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@Patrick_EMIN, correct!

Tasks are considered clear, actionable items or references. Milestones, on the other hand, are specific points in times that mark important parts of a project.

If you would like to learn more about Milestones check out this blog post!

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This is great!

It appears appears that a milestone will not appear in My Tasks unless it is assigned to me. Is this true or is there a setting I am missing?

Assuming that is true, for team awareness it would be really helpful to be able to display milestones that are not assigned to 1 person in all project team members My Tasks view.

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Hey @Curtis_Kasefang

You’re absolutely correct. Milestones will only appear in your My Tasks if they are assigned to you. If you wished to have others informed of a milestone, then I recommend that you add them as collaborators.

This way, if you mark a milestone complete, anyone who is following this milestone will be alerted that it’s been reached/completed via their inbox .

Hope this helps!

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Following is not useful with a Milestone if ones goal of having a milestone is broad awareness of significant dates. I beileve this is the stated purpose. As it stands it is really only a notification mechanism that pings them when it is too late.

To me the purpose of Milestones is to keep team members aware of of important progress points in a project. To this end team members should at least have the option of seeing all pending milestones on Projects of which they are members.

As it stands the current Milestone is a crippled task with a unique icon that only the milestone’s owner can see. Much like a section.

Perhaps the next enhancement can either:

Provide users the option of seeing milestones for projects in which they are members.

or

Allowing milestones to be either unassigned (and not appear in anybody’s Task List), assigned to one person (and appear in only one person’s task list), or assigned to all members (and appear in everybody’s task list.) The 3rd option being the new one.

Either would be helpful. The current implementation is of marginal use.

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Would be nice if you could associate tasks with a milestone and the milestone would include a progress bar or fraction of what was completed (e.g. 31/50 complete)

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From a data model perspective (since you asked about objects), a milestone is not a different object from a task; it is a task object with a resource_subtype of “milestone”, which is what tells the Asana UI to give it the particular visual and behavioral characteristics it exhibits.

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@Victoria_Chernova Thanks for the fantastic news! Could you pass onto the product team that this doesn’t appear in any way to be different from a task when exporting the project? Even a column listed as Milestone with True/False in it would be helpful.

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I hear you Curtis, though I do think that the feature is a little more flexible than it might initially appear.

The purpose of adding collaborators to a task is to alert them when a milestone has been reached. Conversely, by default, project milestones will appear visible in timelines, calendars and project status updates for all members of the Project to see. You’re also able to build out multiple dependencies that are linked to milestones, which help alert people when they’re able to begin working on tasks after key milestones have been reached!

Milestones can be either be unassigned, assigned to a specific individual, or have copies created and assigned to more than one person in bulk! 48%20AM

Hope this helps clarify things just a little but more! We do thank you for your feedback @Curtis_Kasefang and are happy to pass your perspective on to our team to look at!

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Hey @Jonny_MacEachern :wave:
The ability to include a “task completed fraction bar” is an interesting product opportunity I’m more than happy to pass on to our product team; thanks for the feedback!

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Hey @Will.S :wave:
More than happy to pass this feedback on to our product team to review; thanks for the feedback!

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Perhaps you have the benefit of a pre-release version. I do not have the option of bulk copies.

If I had I would have gone out and checked to see if I have bulk modifications, because in my world (architectural design) milestones move and we will have to maintain those several copies of each milestone.

That said having multiple copies of the same item would just add noise in the context of a project.

Our project managers may be managing 20-30 projects with 4± members (unique sets) each, with 12± significant milestones. Doing the math assuming the average project is halfway through the difference between having a single milestone or multiple copies of a milestone is the difference in maintaining 150 milestones or 600 milestones. This is why we rejected using multiple copies of a task as a solution.

Yes, project milestones appear visible in project views, but at least in the Asana I have they are not visible in My Task views unless they are assigned to a person.

At least for us, it is not practical to have our users checking each project (they have 20-30) to see if a milestone moved. The milestone is only useful if they can see it in their task list.

Having our users subscribe to each project calendar would mean that they would be constantly having to weed through 100’s of tasks that aren’t theirs.

Truly it would be most useful if our users could see Milestones for all projects of which they are members in the My Tasks view.

I would think it would provide the most flexibility is one could choose to assign the milestone to nobody (in on task lists), to an individual (in that person’s task list), and to all members (in each member’s task list).

Please pass it on to the development team.

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This feature is great as the way in which we use the platform means often tasks in a project are simply that, and not indicative of overall progress towards the end goal.

I would like to implement this across to multiple (hundreds) of existing projects (which have all been setup based upon the same template) by changing specific tasks within the project (but common across all projects based upon the same template) to milestones. I suspect I already know the answer to this… but is there any way to do this in bulk for multiple projects, or will I have to go into each project individually?

For completeness, I appreciate I can select multiple tasks within a project at the same time and change them in bulk (this is not what I am trying to achieve).

As a feature request, it would be nice to be able to show completed milestones as a percentage or fraction (% or #/#) of total milestones to be complete (similarly to how task progress is shown percentage wise, but limited to the milestones and discounting tasks) instead of just displaying the completed circles.

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Hi @Curtis_Kasefang :wave:t3: and thanks for sharing this detailed feedback with us! This is our first shot at Milestones, and we will definitely look into improving them in the future, so your feedback is very important to us!

For the record, you won’t see the “assign copies” feature unless you physically click into the Assignee field; from what I understand, this workaround doesn’t suit your workflow, but just thought I’d let you know! :slight_smile: