Cross Project Milestone Dependency Tracing in Portfolio?

Hello!
Within a project, the Timeline shows great tracer lines between tasks and milestones that have dependencies and due dates.

However, it looks like we don’t see those lines on the Portfolio timeline when a milestone from one project is marked as dependent on a milestone from another project. (Here both milestones from the Data Point 1 project are dependent on the “BU” Milestone in the Automation Job project.

Is there a way to display those? If not, I’d like to request that as a feature.

Hi @Christopher_Yi and thank you for sharing your feedback with us!

You are correct here. As it stands, cross dependancies are not display in Portfolio’s Timelines but I agree it would be super helpful! Hopefully, this is something we can consider for future improvements! :crossed_fingers:t5:

Have a great Friday!

@Christopher_Yi,

Until/if that becomes available:

If you make one Asana project where each task represents one of your own projects, then you can use the task dependency feature to indicate your project dependencies and see them on a “projects timeline” which is effectively what that one Asana project’s timeline will be in this case.

I have a custom solution referred to in https://forum.asana.com/t/okr-tracking-in-asana/127/9 that uses multiple linked Asana projects for a powerful, flexible related solution.

Larry

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Is there a live link to this solution? We would love an interim approach for how to visualize cross project dependancies in Asana.

@angela_milash, If you’re referring to post prior to yours, I see the link I used was failing so I fixed that. The proper link is OKR Tracking in Asana - #9 by lpb.

Larry

I often saw this solution with an additional project, to have an overview of all dependencies. This cause me to manage the dates on two places… as soon as i change the date of a project (and this happens really often), i also have to fix the “task” in the “overview” project. There is the risk to forget to adapt changes. The people i’m working with focus on their daily business and not on memorizing, where they additionally have to adapt information. Or did i misunderstood something?

To your point, BES, the idea of “you just have to remember to change it here, too” … is an instant no-go for me. It was many burns ago that I thought “oh this won’t be so bad” :slight_smile: But that raises a question - if I have multiple projects containing milestones, and multiple cross project dependencies… could I then multihome those milestones to a new “Milestones” project, and then that project’s timeline view would display those dependencies, because now they’re “all within one project”? Maybe also create one Section for each Project, to keep them somewhat separate. (We ended up going another direction with this whole thing otherwise I’d test it myself)

@BES,

As @Christopher_Yi points out, I was assuming the master project used multi-homing for existing tasks or unique tasks that didn’t require redundant maintenance. (There are multiple ways to handle these kinds of master projects.)

Larry

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