Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
When I add a project using a template, it switches the milestone order (if I have 4 milestones and I check off the first, the second of the 4 indicators shows checked). This only happens on projects added via template. Note: adding the template itself to the portfolio results in correct order, this only happens with projects created from the template.
Steps to reproduce:
Add a project using template with milestones. add project to portfolio set to progress type:milestone.
Browser version:
Chrome Version 80.0.3987.132
Upload screenshots below:
Thank you for reaching out @Joseph_Reynolds and I’m sorry to hear you are experiencing this issue!
In order to investigate this issue would you mind sending me by DM a full screenshot of the project (including URL), the URL of the Portfolio and the URL of the Template used to create this new project?
To DM me you just need to click on my name above and select “Message”. Thank you Joseph! Looking forward to your reply!
Hi @Joseph_Reynolds, we sent your report internally but it hasn’t been prioritized. We currently don’t have immediate plans but I’ll make sure to update this task as soon as we have more information. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience!
Hi @Joseph_Reynolds and my apologies for the delay in getting back to you! Our team reviewed this bug report and it appears to be an expected behaviour. Let me explain why this is happening:
The Milestone progress column in Portfolios shows Milestones sorted by Due Date. In the case where some or all Milestones don’t have a Due Date (which is your case in the exemple you shared), Milestones without a Due Date are added first and are sorted by Creation Date. This explains why the order of Milestone is different in your project and Portfolio.
Why are we automatically showing Milestones sorted by due date in the Portfolio’s Milestone progress? This is to offer a unified view to all users in Portfolio. While a project can be sorted or filtered and display the same information differently for two users, Portfolio always display information the same way for all users.
Hope this makes sense, but please let me know if you have any follow-up questions! And sorry again for the delay in responding!
@Marie Ok, that makes sense. When I create a project from a template - what order does it go in creating the milestones? I assumed it just went down the list in order. Like I said, when I add the template to the portfolio, it shows the milestones in the “correct” order. Adding due dates to my milestones to order them correctly is not an option.
Hi @Marie ! I just ran into this issue. The only request I’d like to add is, can the earliest milestone without due dates be ordered from left to right and not right to left?
Usually one thinks of milestones and creates the respective tasks in order of first to last.
If one does that, the milestone checkmarks in the portfolio high level view organize the array of milestones from right to left, earliest created to latest created. It’s a bit counter intuitive imo.
My work around currently is to write out the milestones then create tasks in reverse order from last to first so as to have the checkmarks be in the right order. Hah, it’s a bit tedious but I’ll survive.
Hi @anon98159747, thanks for taking the time to share your feedback and workaround with us! It’s so useful to understand how you are using the feature so we can share more context in our Voice of the Customer syncs with the product team! I’ll make sure to keep you posted if we have any plans to update this feature in the future!
This is so frustrating that Milestones w/o due dates appear in a Portfolio’s Milestone column in order of date created.
Since this request was created (long ago) you’ve come out with the Project Overview tab. Its Milestone section has no trouble enumerating un-dated Milestones in the order in which they appear in the project, a far more reasonable approach as the Overview designers realized.
Why didn’t you feel it was important enough to fix this in the Portofio Milestone column to match the clearly more reasonable way the Overview tab does it when that was released? It’s inconsistent, and the Portolio Milestone column appears random due to its creation date ordering.
My client can’t use Milestones and Portoflios because of this.
Can you please raise this topic again to be reviewed now that the Overview tab has been released and this inconsistency is more glaring, and logic has already been written there to use to achieve the ordering desired in the Portfolio Milestone column?
Hi @lpb, thanks for the additional feedback. We appreciate the details and note about the recent launch of Project Overview. I’ve gone ahead and share this information with our Product Team and we will definitely keep it in mind as we continue working on Portfolios. I’ve also moved this thread to our #productfeedback category to allow votes!
Hi @Emily_Roman
Long Reply below. Thanks so much for reading and for considering my feedback!!
My company is a relatively new user to Asana and my team is enjoying the product! I work on the Sales team and we are currently using Portfolios to track projects from inception to Opportunity Closed. The Portfolio view is great for this and I really like the Milestone view.
I agree with the previous comments in this thread about the ordering of Milestones in Portfolio view. I think it is more intutive to display Milestones to match their task order in the “List” view of the project. I think most people order their tasks in chronological order on the “List” page and the Milestones will likely follow that order.
I understand the logic of ordering Milestones in Portfolio view based on Due Date. If every Milestone has a Due Date this makes perfect sense and is how I would want to see it anyway. The main issue is that at least for my team we don’t set the Due Dates of all Milestones all at once. We assign them dates as we go and we don’t have hard and fast due date rules for tasks/milestones (so we don’t use dependencies, etc.). So if we have some Milestones with Due Dates and some without the Portfolio view makes the Milestone progress look strange.
I would prefer to not have to avoid putting in Due Dates either as we use Due Dates to track date of completion as well (have rule that sets Due Date to Today after task is completed).
So, I think a great feature would be to have an option in Portfolio view for Milestones to be sorted by either Due Date (current way) or List order (according to order in List view). For the 2nd option, the due dates are displayed on the milestones in Portfolio view but they don’t affect the ordering.
This second option makes the most sense for my team and I imagine other teams. I have designed the Milestones to mirror the linear steps a project has to go through. It can’t jump or skip milestones so it doesn’t make sense to see the milestones appear out of order.
For now I will add Due Dates to every milestone when I create the project. For the further out Milestones I will make the dates far in the future so they don’t mess up the order.
Thank you so much for reading this! I am very much enjoying Asana and the plethora of documentation and help that exists. Great work!
Hi @lpb , I agree the current way that milestones are ordered in the Portfolio’s progress column (by creation date) makes no sense at all.
@Emily_Roman , this has been a complaint by numerous clients I work with, often wondering why their milestones are all jumbled up. This renders the Progress column in Portfolios unusable, and thus they reluctantly revert to switching the Progress column to show the task % completion bar instead.
We hope this issue can be raised once again to the Product team, especially in line with the launch of the new Portfolio Grid layout, as per my discussion with @lpbhere.
I came here because this topic was linked in a different thread. I appreciate this explanation as to why the order of the milestones seems all mixed up in portfolio view.
But I also agree it is unfortunately basically not useable for us in this state since we work similar to the way described and can only assign due dates to the Milestones as we go due to the nature of our projects.
So @Emily_Roman I understand the order depending on due date, but as the other users said it is still very confusing and I would much prefer a view corresponding with the order of the milestones in the list view. I hope you consider making this an option.
first sort everything by due date, add all the milestones that don’t have a due date at the end
then sort all milestones that have the same date (either a real date or null) in the order that they appear on the unsorted list view, or the list view that is default for everyone.
That would certainly be better than what we have now!
If you check, I think you’ll see the project Overview tab > Milestones display is much closer to this than the Portfolio column. If Portfolio simply did whatever Overview is currently doing, that would be a big improvement.
We are adding milestones to projects with task templates and they will not be dated for some time. Marie’s reply on this post says milestones should appear in their created order if there’s no due date and that makes sense but it appears task templates may create tasks and milestones in an arbitrary order from time to time and our milestone column in a portfolio is difficult to understand because of this. It would be great if Milestones could show up in list order in the Portfolio column much like the overview tab as others have said to circumvent the issue.
Another idea is to have the option to filter to show dated order (of creation and due date) or list view order.
It did give me an idea, and I’ve experimented with turning milestones back into tasks and vice versa. Sadly, the order seems to be determined by creation date/time, it’s not influenced by (de)marking as milestone, and the only way to force it is to create the milestones in reverse order. The only improvement on your approach I can think if is not having to re-create the last milestone.
For westerners it commonly doesn’t make sense to have the order of doing things anything other than left to right, or top to bottom. The fact that in this case top to bottom converts into right to left is really counter intuitive. Especially since creating new tasks (hit [enter]) is by default from top to bottom.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up on getting this fixed anytime soon since there appears to be no progress in being able to Reverse the order of comments
