Measure Goals by numeric custom field of tasks within projects

Apart from the option to automatically update the progress of a Goal by measuring the Milestones or the Tasks completed within a project, which is just counting tasks, it would be great to have the option to measure from a specific number custom field within projects. This number field would be in the field library and used across several projects.

This would be similar to how we can currently change the Y-axis in a dashboard’s chart to a number field, instead of just task count.

This would essentially work like the roll-up field in Portfolios.

A use case I had with a client was that they had a project with a ‘Profit’ field in a currency and they wanted to automatically roll-up the sum of all the ‘Profit’ from all the completed tasks into the current value of the Goal, in the currency. So if the total sum of ‘Profit’ of all tasks was $100k and 50% of the tasks were completed, the Goal should show whatever is the value of those tasks in the currency (eg. let’s say $65k), rather than 50%.

I believe this would add further flexibility and value to Asana’s Goals feature.

PS: the cherry on the cake would also be the ability to also filter the measurement of automatic Goal progress.

2 Likes

I strongly support @Richard_Sather’s suggestion! This functionality would be incredibly beneficial for many teams.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario I can imagine: Let’s say a marketing team is using a numeric custom field to track the average time spent on content creation tasks. Currently, their Goal progress only shows the percentage of tasks completed, which doesn’t give them a clear picture of the content creation effort required. By measuring Goal progress by the sum of time spent on completed tasks, they could identify trends in content creation time and adjust their resourcing accordingly. This would be especially helpful for managing projects with tight deadlines and ensuring enough content is produced on time.

Additional thoughts:

  • Flexibility: The ability to choose any numeric custom field (not just currency) would open up a lot of possibilities for different teams and use cases.
  • Filtering: If we could filter the tasks included in the Goal progress calculation (by assignee, tag, etc.), it would be even more powerful. For example, we could create a Goal to track the total estimated hours completed by a specific team member.
  • Portfolios: This feature would make Goals even more valuable in Portfolios, allowing us to track progress across multiple projects based on a standardized metric.

Overall, this enhancement would make Asana Goals a much more flexible and powerful tool for tracking progress. I hope the Asana team considers implementing it!

@Paul_Grobler , thanks for weighing with some great use cases and thoughts!
I hope more feel the same way so the Asana team can consider this.

What I have:
I have an estimating pipeline set up. It’s a project that’s being used to track bids that we have submitted. Each asana task is a specific bid, and each bid has a value associated with it along with other data points.

The columns and some sample data look like this:

Task Name Assignee Date Received Due Date Follow-up Date Project Value Status
Condominiums John Smith 12/5/2024 01/02/2025 01/15/2025 $1,578,000 Submitted
Recreation Center John Smith 10/20/2024 12/06/2024 01/03/2025 $4,145,875 Closed - Won

What I’m trying to do:
I’m trying to create a goal that automatically adds the value of these bids that have been won over the year and compares that to a static number.

The problem:
I have created a goal “2024 Sales Goal (50M)”. I see the progress sources like “manual” and subgoals but none of them seem to accomplish what I need.

  • For Subgoals, I can use $USD as measurement and add values of the subgoals but I can’t seem to set the target value of the goal.
  • For Projects, I can only use the completion state of the tasks or milestones, not the value of a task’s column.
  • For Manual, I can set $USD as measurement but a user would then have to manually add every won bid value to the current goal value.

Am I missing something or are we just limited in what we can do?

I’ve merged your post into an existing topic where you can click the title to scroll to the top and vote by clicking the purple Vote button, like I did!

Thanks,

Larry