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Project progress and status updates

In This Article

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.

Overview tab 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 tab, you can:

  1. Check if the project is on track, at risk, off track, on hold, complete, or dropped
  2. Request a status update or update the project’s status
  3. View or change the project roles
  4. View or change the project due date, or date range
  5. 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.

milestones overview

From the overview, you can:

  1. View key resources associated with the project
  2. View or add a new milestone using the + icon
  3. View any goals associated with the project
Note iconNote

Only portfolios you have access to will be displayed.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Under the What's the status? field from your project’s overview tab.

From the status update window, you can:

  1. Add a title
  2. Fill in your status update details, including progress, the project name, project Owner, and project dates
  3. Choose which custom fields you want to include in your update
  4. Add a new section
  5. Include a Summary
  6. Outline your Next steps
  7. Drag highlights into your update to help tell your story
  8. Once you've entered an update, click the blue Post button
Note iconNote

Please note that you must select a project status of before you can post a project status update.

Adding custom fields to status updates

The ability to add custom fields in your status update is available on Asana Advanced, Enterprise, Enterprise+, as well as legacy tiers Business and Legacy Enterprise.

Portfolio custom fields applied to projects

Similar to how you can apply custom field values to tasks within a project to provide additional context and improve reporting, you can also apply custom fields to projects within a portfolio. The custom field value referenced in a status update comes directly from the custom field applied to the project at the portfolio level.

Show or hide fields in status updates

For example, the custom field “Regional Impact” might be used at the portfolio level to indicate the scope or priority of each project, with different values applied to individual projects. In this case, the "Regional Impact" value for the Quarterly EMEA Editorial Calendar project is set to "Moderate," and this value can be reflected in the project’s status update. This makes it easy to carry over portfolio-level insights into status updates, providing clear and consistent context for stakeholders.

Portfolio custom field referenced in project status update

Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. See them in action with a free Asana trial. Try for free.

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.

highlight ordering
Note iconNote

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.

charts

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.

turn off status update reminders

To turn off these status update reminders:

  1. Navigate to the Status update View
  2. Click the Remind me to update the status every Friday switch
Note iconNote

Status updates will appear in the project's overview and messages.

Print or delete a status update

delete status

To print or delete a status update:

  1. Click the three dot icon beside the status update
  2. Click Print status update or Delete status update
Note iconNote

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.

completing a project

To complete a project:

  1. Click on the three dots and select the Complete option in the drop-down.
  2. 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.
Note iconNote

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.

Note iconNote

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:

completed project status

To uncomplete a project, click on Complete to select an updated status from the drop-down menu.

notifications

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".

Restore project
 
Note iconNote
Need help cratfing your status updates? Ask the Community.

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Project progress and status updates