Project progress and status updates
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- Overview
- Project progress snapshot
- Milestones, portfolios and custom fields overview
- Recent status updates
- How to create a status update
- Adding highlights to a status update
- Adding charts to a status update
- Update status reminders
- Print or delete a status update
- A note on snapshotting
- Privacy
- Completing a project
- How to uncomplete a project
Overview
The overview section gives you an in depth snapshot of the status of any project you’re working on. Status reports make it easy to create rich, repeatable, actionable status updates and share your work with key stakeholders.
Project overview snapshot
When you click into the Overview tab in your project, you’ll be presented with a snapshot of your project’s current progress status.
From the Overview, you can:
- Check if the project is on track, at risk, off track, or complete
- Request a status update or update the project’s status
- View or change the project roles
- View or change the project due date, or date range
- Send Messages to members
Milestones, goals, and key resources overview
From your Overview tab, you can also see milestones, goals, and key resources which are associated with your project.
From the overview, you can:
Only portfolios you have access to will be displayed. Portfolios are available to all Business users.
Recent status updates
From the Overview tab, you can get a quick look at historical status updates with the dots diagram.
From the Dashboard tab, users can access a burnup chart to help track your team's velocity over time and the speed at which they are completing the work. Customize charts to see what tasks are completed vs what's not completed and more. Visit this article to see how you can display metrics for a project's overall performance and progress or highlight issues.
How to create a status update
Any project member can set a status to inform other project members on a project’s progress.
The templatized block structure allows you to incorporate the actual work being done in Asana with narrative context to explain the status of the work.
Creating your status update
To create a new status update:
- Click the Update status icon from your project’s progress view.
- From any project view, you can also select a new status drop-down menu by clicking on Set status if the project has no status, or clicking on the existing status.
The ability to add custom fields in your status update is a Business feature. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. See them in action with a free 30 day Asana trial. Try for free.
From the status update window, you can:
- Add a title
- Fill in your status update details, including progress, the project name, project Owner, and project dates
- Choose which custom fields you want to include in your update
- Add a new section
- Include a Summary
- Outline your Next steps
- Outline the main accomplishments since your last update
- Drag highlights into your update to help tell your story
- Once you've entered an update, click the blue Post button
Please note that you must select a project status of on track, at risk, off track, on hold, or complete before you can post a project status update.
Adding highlights to your status update
You can drag and drop highlights such as completed milestones or overdue tasks into your status update to help tell your story. Adding these highlights gives a visual insight into recent achievements or potential blockers for your Team.
Once you’ve added your highlights and published your status update, Asana will remember the block structure and order for future updates.
You can also reorder your Summary, What we’ve accomplished, and Next steps section by dragging and dropping them into place.
Adding charts to a status update
You can add charts to your status update to give a visual representation of the work being done.
Update status reminders
Each project's owner will receive a weekly task each Thursday to update the status of their project due Friday. If you are the project owner and do not want to receive these reminders, you can turn them off.
To turn off these status update reminders:
- Navigate to the Status update View
- Click the Remind me to update the status every Friday switch
Status updates will appear in the project's overview and messages.
Print or delete a status update
To print or delete a status update:
- Click the three dot icon beside the status update
- Click Print status update or Delete status update
You can only delete your own project status, not a status posted by others.
A note on snapshotting
Status updates are intended to be a snapshot of a project's status at a moment in time. As such the data is frozen at the time of publishing. This includes things like project name, custom fields, task names, due dates, and assignees.
This means that if a task name or due date changes after publishing, the appearance of the task in the update will stay the same so you can look back and get a complete account of a project's Status at a moment in time.
Privacy
Anyone who is added as a collaborator on a status update will be able to see the entire contents of the report, even if they don't have access to the underlying project.
This means they'll be able to see whatever task details or text is included in the report. However, if they click on a task, milestone, etc, that is part of a project they don't have access to, they will see a request access page but will not be able to access the underlying data unless they are granted access.
Completing a project
Projects can be completed, regardless of whether there is an existing project status.
To complete a project:
- Click on the three dots and select the Complete option in the drop-down.
- Click on Set status if the project does not have an existing status, or click on the existing status to select Complete from the drop-down.
Completed projects should be marked as Complete in the status update instead of archiving them. We’d recommend completing projects before archiving. Archiving a project allows you to focus on more active project but does not update a project's status.
Marking a project as complete makes it easy to distinguish Complete from other statuses in a summary of projects in portfolios and Reporting.
How to uncomplete a project
Once a project is completed, the Overview page will look like this:
To uncomplete a project, click on Complete to select an updated status from the drop-down menu.
Users can also turn off notifications for this update by ticking the checkbox in the upper right-hand corner.
A project that has been completed and archived will show the Complete status and a banner that says "This project is archived".
