Should a cross-functional campaign be set up as a Project or a Goal when teams contribute different percentages?

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1

Hi Everyone,
I have a question about multiple teams contribute a project or campaign.

What I’m trying to do
I’m setting up a campaign that involves multiple teams working together toward a shared outcome. For example:

  • Marketing Team contribution: 30%
  • Event Team contribution: 70%

I would like to track the overall progress of the campaign and reflect the different contribution weights of each team.

What I’ve tried so far
I have reviewed the concepts of Projects and Goals in Asana and understand that:

  • Projects are used to manage tasks and deliverables.
  • Goals are used to track outcomes and progress.

I am considering either:

  1. Creating the campaign as a Project and tracking progress through tasks and milestones.
  2. Creating the campaign as a Goal and linking work from multiple teams to it.

What’s not working or confusing
I’m not sure which approach is considered best practice when multiple teams contribute to the same initiative but with different weighting or ownership percentages.

For example, if the Event Team is responsible for 70% of the effort and Marketing is responsible for 30%, can Asana automatically reflect these contribution rates in progress tracking, or is there a recommended way to model this?

Question
For a cross-functional campaign involving multiple teams with different contribution percentages:

  • Would you set this up as a Project, a Goal, or a combination of both?
  • How do you track weighted contributions (e.g., 70% vs 30%) from different teams?
  • Are there any best practices or examples from your organization?

Thank you!
Henry

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Hi Henry,

Good question, and I like that you’re already thinking in the right categories: how the work gets organized versus how the outcome gets tracked.

Here’s how I’d approach it. Start with one project for the campaign, and use a custom field, something simple like “Team,” to denote each task as Marketing or Event. Once that’s in place, you can build separate views in the project filtered by that field, so Marketing has a view that only shows their work, Event has one that only shows theirs, and you (or whoever’s watching the whole campaign) can pull up a view that shows everything together. Same project, same source of truth, just sliced different ways depending on who’s looking at it.

Then you can roll up the project up to a Goal for tracking the outcome to the campaign goal.

5

Hi Kaitlyn,
Thank you for the explanation. I understand that the Team custom field can be used to identify which team owns each task (e.g., Marketing or Event), and that filtered views can be created for each team while keeping a single source of truth.

My follow-up question is about progress tracking at the team level. Within the same campaign project, how would you recommend tracking:

  • Marketing team’s overall progress (%)
  • Event team’s overall progress (%)
  • Each team’s contribution to the overall campaign progress (%)

For example, if Marketing is responsible for 30% of the campaign effort and Event is responsible for 70%, is there a best practice in Asana to reflect these weighted contributions? Or would this require separate projects, portfolios, goals, or some form of custom reporting?

I’d love to hear how others have handled this scenario. Thanks!
Henry

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Welcome, @Henry_Choi,

Since it sounds like you want to manage/track both work and goals, you’d need project(s) and goals.

But without more Discovery, I don’t think anyone could give you a definitive answer of how to set up the work in project(s), how many you should have, and how they would be structured. It would depend on how complex the work is, how long it lasts, how deeply you want to track in Asana, and more.

With respect to goals, they are set up in a hierarchy of goals and subgoals to as many levels deep as needed, with multiple Automatic and one Manual way to track goal progress. Automatic goals may take advantage of a goal weighting feature.

For example, at the top of the hierarchy you might have a goal for the campaign as a whole, with two subgoals, one for the Marketing team contribution (30%) and one for the Event team contribution (70%).

There’s not enough information without further discussion about whether you’d want more subgoals, or how those thoese subgoals’ progress should be configured (perhaps my milestone completion in project(s)).

Unfortunately, a Forum does not provide enough interactivity to design workflows, in my opinion, but that’s a start at least.

Thanks,

Larry

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Hi @lpb ,
Thank you, that’s very helpful.

I have one more question to make sure I understand the recommended design correctly.

If my objective is to track an overall campaign where Marketing contributes 30% and Event contributes 70%, would it be sufficient to:

  • Create one Campaign Goal
  • Create two Projects (Marketing and Event)
  • Configure the Campaign Goal to use weighted progress from the two projects (30% / 70%)

In other words, is there a benefit to introducing the extra subgoal layer, or can project-level weighting adequately handle this use case?

Thanks again for your guidance.

Henry

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There is no “project-level weighting” feature.

I don’t know of a way to use the goal weighting feature in this context without the subgoals.

Thanks,

Larry