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 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.
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!
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!
For goals that are number based, it would be nice to link the progress of a particular goal to a connected project or portfolio’s dashboard charts.
We use Asana to track time on certain tasks and we use the dashboard to see how we’ve improved (or not improved) over time. As it stands, it seems goal progress is only updated through how many tasks or milestones are completed. Sometimes, it’s not about how many tasks we’ve done, but how well we’ve done them. I’d like the progress of a goal to be directly and automatically linked to the progress seen on a chart. The only way I know to do this is by copying chart images and updating the goal’s progress manually.
Hi @Kimberly_King , I have suggested something which I think is similar to your ask, but just described differently. Would you like me to merge yours into mine? (votes will be consolidated)
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. Past votes have been merged.
Just want to add a similar use-case here, that would be so impactful for our enterprise trying to onboard to asana. We have a Jira sync where we are brining in story points, so if we could sum Story Points as a custom field to track progress that would also give us a more automatic sum of the goal’s progress from a bottom-up jira standpoint vs us needing to account for each of these manually at this stage. That is very time consuming and need re-editing when new items are added.
For some projects we manually tack % complete or Story Points as custom fields (or Jira Syncs) and it would be helpful in the goal progress tracking if we could also designate a custom field as the metric to determine completeness so that I do not need to manually update the tasks each time in the manual mode we can just track in our custom fields. There are a few use cases here used by different teams.
Scenario One: Tracking a tasks progress as a %, so say Task A is 50% complete. We could still evenly weight the tasks so that they sum the percentage of this custom field to get the % complete, so if Task B is 0% complete the overall goal is 25% complete. This could get more dynamic as well, we could add an additional criterion for effort etc…
Scenario Two: Let’s consider story points. Task A is 50% complete and is 8 SP. Task B is 0% complete and its 5 story points. If these are my only two tasks for a goal progress then my total Story Points is 13 and I have completed 4, so our % complete is ~30%.
