Better ways of measuring progress - Measuring sub tasks and adding weight to tasks

HI there Asana Team

Measuring Sub Tasks.

I run a web design company and use the board format with tasks to map out web design projects.
We will create a task “Create landing page” in a project and then use subtasks such as “Page title, Page Copy, Header Image, Section A, Section, B, Call to action”.

A single task can have tons of subtasks.

Now when we mark off subtasks, the progress doesn’t change.
It would be great if the subtasks were added to the progress calculation.

eg:

Task A has 10 subtasks
Task B has 10 substaks
Task C has 10 subtasks
Task D has 10 substasks

Right now if you mark off

9 Task A subtasks
9 Task B subtasks
9 Task C subtasks
9 Task D subtasks

Your progress is zero, but it should be closer to 90%


The second part of the problem is not all tasks are created equal. eg:
Creating a complex landing page != to a small T&Cs page.

It would be amazing to be able to add weight to a task, so when you mark off bigger tasks, the progress is a lot clearer.

eg:
All tasks are given a default weight of 1
Therefore if you have 5 tasks
Task A with weight of 1
Task B with weight of 1
Task C with weight of 1
Task D with a weight of 1
Task E with a weight of 6

If you marked task E off, the progress would be 60% complete instead of 20% complete as it is now.

Would love some feedback!

2 Likes

I can really relate to this. One of the elements that I found useless in the old dashboard report was % complete. We have a lot of tasks that make up our project template, and some of them represent weeks or even months of work, while others would be done in an afternoon. The % complete total on its own didn’t tell the full story. A task weighting system would make that much more accurate and useful.

2 Likes

Also, another one of the easiest ways of fixing this is to add hours as a custom field.
ie: each task is allocated a numerical amount of hours taken to complete.

1 Like

This is great idea - is it now working? Does it now properly show % complete in the progress bar?

Was anyone ever able to find a solution to this? We also use subtasks in projects, however the project progress only looks at parent tasks, so a project looks 50% complete, when really we are only about 15% complete, the rest of the unmarked tasks are sub-tasks.

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We added Everhour to Asana which helps us track time and measure progress with number of hours used / budget for a project.

I agree adding weight to tasks would help to accurately reflect the progress % in portfolios.
I would also like to add weight to sections. My division have some projects which house 4x milestones, with 1 milestone per section. It would be great it we could weight each section at 25 each (with the full project being weighted 100), so that the progress % could be accurate.

Is it also possible to see the percentage progress of a project in a dashboard in the reporting page? I would like a chart to show:

  • x axis = projects within a specific portfolio
  • y axis = percentage complete
4 Likes

Are we able to accomplish this by leveraging rules and creating a custom column?

1 Like