Goals filtering hierarchy

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1

The following refers to the “Company Goals” and “Team Goals” views.

While filtering goals according to quarters, there is no way to keep the parent goal in sight.
If a KR is nested under an objective, the objective might be a yearly objective, while the KRs nested under it might be quarterly.
For instance, if you filter according to Q4, the parent Objective disappears (because it is set as a yearly goal) and there is no longer any hint for what the parent goal is any more. But if you choose to filter according to a specific quarter and choose to view the yearly goal as well, then the Q filter becomes irrelevant as any and all goals nested under the yearly goal are displayed as well (Q1,Q2,Q3…).

I have a few Ideas on how to solve this:

  • Filtering with hierarchy #1 - When filtering according to year, if a second filter is chosen as well (Q4 for instance) then all Q4 goals will be displayed nested under their parent goal and other Q’s will be hidden.
  • Filtering with hierarchy #2 - When filtering according to year, if a second filter is chosen as well (Q4 for instance) then all Q4 goals will be highlighted and displayed while nested under their parent goal alongside all other Q’s that are greyed out.
  • Breadcrumbs - When filtering goals, keep the parent goal displayed underneath or above in a smaller font and slightly greyed out in order to keep tabs of where this goal belongs. Maybe even as a clickable link.

While the above refers to the “Company Goals” and “Team Goals” views, the problem extends further as “My Goals” doesn’t even have a filtering option, as well as when viewing within a specific goal there is no way to filter the goals nested within it, and although there are breadcrumbs when viewing within a specific goal, in my opinion they are poorly designed and confusing making it difficult to see the parent goal (especially if the goal has mor that 6 words or has grandparents).

At my company, this issue makes it difficult to use the goals feature directly in asana for reviewing progress on a monthly basis, and requires to go back to presentations with screenshots or tables with content that is already available in asana but difficult to see. It makes it hare to see the bigger picture.

I would love to see an improvement here as the tool is very useful for keeping track on goals, but not great presenting them, or navigating them.

2

Navigating goals can be quite awkward sometimes… We learned it ourselves by using Goals, and we often stumble onto the wrong filter being applied, or not applied…

3

It would be great to know how you have approached this.

We Goals as part of our OKR process. Under the best practice of OKR’s, Objectives generally will span more than one OKR cycle, and Key Results (KR’s) will be for a single OKR cycle.

The only way I can see the expanding working in filtering right now is to Duplicate Objectives or simply set change the Time Period each OKR cycle.

Ideally Asana would include everything related to a Time Period if you filter on a Qtr, not just the Qtr and act like a true hiearchy.

4

Hey @Stephen_McGrath ,

We too use the standard OKR methodology. Currently the feature remains the same since my original post and so does the issue.

What we do to partially resolve this is quite ridicules… we have Objectives set as yearly objectives; nested under them are 4 duplicates of that same objective, each with an additional prefix stating
the quarter this duplicate represents (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4), and each tagged with the relevant quarter which triggers asana’s filtering feature; then we nest the Key Results (KR) within the relevant Q Objective.

Basically we’ve created a folder system within the goals feature.

Until recently, the goals feature calculated each Goal/KR with the same weight resulting in disproportional scoring of objectives which were subject to the amount of KR’s nested underneath them. A bonus of our folder system is that we get an equal 25% weight for each Q no matter how many KR’s are nested within it.
Recently, asana introduced a weight feature allowing you to give each KR a different weight which is great, but a bit more tedious, yet allows more accuracy.

Our method results in the followings:

  1. Filtering on the Q level allows to view KRs nested directly underneath the parent Objective, eliminating disorientation.
  2. Equal weight for each Q of an objective no matter what is nested within the “folder”.
  3. When managers update their goals once a month, users report that the “folder” helps them not miss any KR they need to update as they are concentrated all together and clearly tagger with the relevant Q.

The downside to our method is the setup. Each Objective now has an additional 4 duplicates, resulting in a few hundred more objectives that necessary and setting it up is a delicate, meticulous and tedious task with room for mistakes, and yet when we tried to stop this with our 2024 planning, every single one of our managers requested we bring this back because of the cons of not having it and the pros of having it.

We still use PowerPoint presentations for Quarterly meeting where we go through each departments OKRs (Goals), as doing so directly in asana is terrible partially because of this problem and loosing orientation is guaranteed, resulting in more work preparing the presentation, copying the information/data from asana.

Now that we have begun our 2025 planning, sadly we need to stick to the method because Asana has yet paid any attention or interest in the issue and have not presented a solution.

Perhaps my solution will help you and others with the same problem.

Thanks for sharing,
Itay