How to Effectively Use Asana Milestones to Track Progress

Using Asana for project management? Asana Milestones can help you track important events on your timeline and keep your team on track. If you’re new to Milestones, we’re here to give you the info you need to get started using them.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• The benefits of using Milestones in project management
• How to set up Milestones in Asana
• Asana Milestone limitations (and how to overcome them)

Visor has two-way integrations to help you share up-to-date milestones from Asana, Jira, Salesforce, and more. Try it for free!

What Are Asana Milestones?

Milestones in Asana are specific points in your project timeline that signify important achievements or deadlines. They help break down larger projects into manageable bites, making it easier to track progress and ensure that critical tasks are completed on time.

Benefits of Using Milestones

There are plenty of reasons to include Milestones in your project timelines. Here are a few of the most important: 

1. They add clarity and focus: Milestones provide a clear structure for your project, highlighting key goals and deadlines.
2. Milestones can motivate your team: Celebrating the completion of milestones can boost team morale and keep everyone motivated.
3. They help track progress: Milestones offer a tangible way to measure progress, helping you identify potential delays or issues early on.
4. Milestones keep stakeholders in the loop: They make it easier to communicate project status to stakeholders, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Setting Up Milestones in Asana

It doesn’t take much to set up a new Milestone in Asana – here’s what to do:

1. Identify Key Deliverables: Start by breaking down your project into major phases or key deliverables. Each of these can become a milestone.
2. Create a Project: In Asana, create a new project or open an existing one.
3. Add Milestones: Click on the “Add Task” button and select “Milestone” from the dropdown menu. Give your milestone a clear and descriptive name.

4. Set Due Dates: Assign due dates to each milestone to ensure your team knows when each phase should be completed.

5. Assign Owners: Under the Assignee header, designate team members responsible for each milestone to ensure accountability.

You can also create Milestones outside of Asana using Visor. Visor lets you combine data from multiple sources, including Asana, Jira, and Salesforce, letting you add depth to your data. Give it a try for free to find out how it can help you visualize progress for stakeholders. 

Ways to Use Milestones to Track Progress

Once you have a Milestone added to your Asana project, here are a few ways to use it:

• Provide regular updates: If your team makes sure to update the status of tasks and subtasks associated with each milestone regularly, you can keep everyone informed. This lets you ensure your team is aware of progress and any potential roadblocks.
• Share progress: Asana’s reporting tools can generate progress reports that highlight the status of milestones. This can be useful for team meetings and stakeholder updates.
• Identify conflicts: Asana’s Timeline view can give you a visual representation of your project’s progress. This view shows how milestones and tasks are sequenced and helps identify any scheduling conflicts.
• Celebrate your successes: When a milestone is completed, you can take a moment to celebrate the achievement with your team. Recognizing these successes can boost morale and keep everyone motivated, even if it’s only a short moment during standup.

Best Practices for Managing Asana Milestones

Now that you’ve got the basics down, here are a few tricks and tips to help you use Milestones more effectively: 

• Set Realistic Goals: Ensure that the milestones you set are achievable and realistic. Overly ambitious milestones can lead to frustration and burnout.
• Prioritize Milestones: Focus on the most critical milestones that will drive your project forward. Avoid cluttering your project with too many minor milestones.
• Stay Flexible: Agile is the name of the game. Be prepared to adjust your milestones as the project evolves. Changes in scope, resources, or timelines may require you to revisit and revise your milestones.
• Communicate Clearly: Make sure all team members understand the importance of each milestone and their role in achieving it. Clear communication is key to successful milestone management.
• Know When Asana Isn’t Enough: If you need to share Milestones with your wider organization, you may find Asana can’t help you communicate effectively on its own. Keep its limitations in mind so you can supplement Asana with other tools when necessary. 

Milestones in Visor’s Gantt View

Asana Milestone Limitations (And How to Overcome Them with Visor)

Asana does a lot, but it has limits. If you want to open communication between your team and another team or keep stakeholders updated, you may find Asana Milestones need a little assistance. 

That’s where Visor can help. Visor is a spreadsheet-inspired workspace that lets you combine data from multiple sources — including Asana. It also offers its own Milestones, so you can keep track of them whether or not you’re an Asana user. 

Asana integrations in visor

Here are a few Asana limitations to look out for, and the ways Visor can help you overcome them.

Asana Limitation: Cost. Asana charges per seat, so if you want to share Asana Milestones and other data, it can get expensive very quickly.

How Visor Can Help: Free Viewers. In Visor, you’re only charged for active users. Viewers are always free, meaning you can share Asana data with stakeholders in Visor without adding extra seats to your Asana account.

Asana Limitation: Non-users. If you work with teams that aren’t using Asana, sharing data can be tricky. If you have stakeholders that can’t or won’t use Asana, you may struggle to keep everyone up on the latest team Milestones. And even if stakeholders do use Asana, the tool has limiteds customization options, so they may have difficulty finding what they need.

How Visor Can Help: Custom Views. Visor gives you the ability to create custom Views that fit specific teams, groups, or individual users. You can filter data so that users are only seeing what they need and create unlimited numbers of different Views so that everyone has just what they need. These custom Views can be shared with stakeholders who don’t have access to Asana or teammates that need custom data to keep up with Milestones. 

Asana Limitation: Integrations. While there are integrations between Asana and other tools (like Jira, for instance), some things can get lost in translation. Data can get duplicated or not entered in both tools, resulting in your team missing out on key information. 

How Visor Can Help: Connect to multiple tools. You can connect Jira, Asana, Salesforce, and other project management tools through Visor, letting you give stakeholders a current timeline that runs across multiple tools. The result is your whole organization can connect to one central source of truth that has all your project management data without creating a complicated web of integrations.

Enhance your Project Management with Asana + Visor

Asana Milestones can greatly enhance your project management by providing clear structure, motivation, and progress tracking. By setting up milestones in Asana and regularly updating their status, you can keep your team focused and stakeholders informed. And by leveraging Visor, you can help fill any gaps in data sharing, allowing for seamless integration with other tools like Jira and Salesforce.

Try integrating Asana with Visor today to experience streamlined project tracking and improved collaboration.

If this article was helpful, consider reading these related articles:

• Your Complete Guide to Gantt Chart Milestones
• Stakeholder Alignment: How Project Managers Save Time with Visor
• How to Hack Asana for Project Management

Moira West

Moira West

Moira West is a former journalist and educator who has spent the last nine years writing about technology, data management, and more. She is excited to now bring her expertise to Visor. When she's not working, she spends time with her family, paints, bakes, and writes more -- just for fun.