I’m looking for a solution to the following problem: I want to track the overall progress of a project. Using the number of tasks is not suitable, because some tasks take only a few minutes while others may take several days.
Tracking progress via milestones seems more meaningful in principle. However, even with milestones there is an issue: if a project has, for example, 5 milestones, not every milestone should necessarily represent 20% of the overall progress.
Does anyone have experience with weighting milestones to better reflect their relative effort or importance?
One idea I had was to chain multiple milestones to simulate weighting. For example:
The project has 10 milestones in total.
Reaching Milestone 1 represents 10% progress.
Reaching Milestone 2 should represent another 20% (30% total).
To achieve this, I would place two milestones back-to-back and link them with a rule: when Milestone 2 is completed, Milestone 3 is automatically marked as completed as well.
Is this a reasonable approach, or is there a more elegant solution in Asana that I’m overlooking? Am I overengineering this?
Thanks in advance for any insights or best practices!
In order to execute your approach, I think you’d need either an AI Studio rule, or a Script action rule (requires Enterprise and some code) because regular rules can only operate on the triggered task, not an independent task.
Where do you want to see the progress percent reflected? In the project List view, project Dashboard, a Universal Reporting Dashboard, or in a Portfolio?
If in a portfolio, you can do Options > Show/Hide columns > Milestone progress. That’s what I would do first. I would include the cumulative percent in the milestone task titles (e.g., 30% in the second one). When you hover the last completed (green check) milestone diamond in the portfolio row cell for the project, you’ll see the percent complete.
For something fancier, you could use a Weight percent numeric custom field to set the weight of each milestone (all should total 100), and a Dashboard number chart (either in the project or elsewhere) could sum those to show the percent complete.
thank you very much for your support and for the extremely helpful and thoughtful response — much appreciated.
To give some context first: the main reason I’m focusing on progress tracking is the comparison between budget consumption and delivery progress. We can see budget burn very clearly in our ERP system — but a budget consumption of, say, 75% is only “good” if delivery progress is at least 75% as well. If delivery progress is significantly lower, that’s a clear warning signal.
Based on that, ideally I’d like to see progress reflected on multiple levels:
Level 1: Directly on the task level. In our setup, a task represents a single deliverable within a campaign (e.g. landing page, social media post, banner, brochure, etc.).
This level is primarily relevant for project management and may even be optional in practice.
Level 2: Aggregated across all deliverables of a campaign.
This level is mainly used by project management to understand whether the campaign is progressing evenly across its individual deliverables.
Level 3: The overall campaign level.
This is the level that is most relevant to me in my role as managing director.
At this level, I want to understand whether the campaign as a whole is staying within budget. Some deliverables may be very efficient and effectively compensate for others where budget consumption was disproportionately high. From my perspective, the key question is whether the total campaign budget is aligned with the overall delivery progress across all deliverables, rather than whether each individual asset is perfectly balanced.
That’s why I’m looking for a robust (potentially weighted) way to express delivery progress and make it visible at different aggregation levels, so it can be meaningfully compared against financial data outside of Asana.
Thanks again — your suggestions around milestone progress in portfolios and weighted milestone approaches are especially helpful, and I’ll definitely explore those first.