Track progress by milestone in Trello

Question

A colleague of mine is trying to set up a project in Trello that would allow her to track progress against a key milestone. For example, one of her lists would be labelled "Milestone 1" and all the cards in that list would be categorised as Milestone 1. She could then filter by how many cards were complete vs. incomplete for Milestone 1.

1. How would I set up a list and corresponding cards to enable this?
2. Is this possible to filter something like this in the Trello Dashboard?

Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows · Answer

@Debbie Stephenson no, I don't believe it's possible to filter on custom fields for the moment. Just labels and lists for now! Not sure if it helps, but you do have gray labels available which you could use instead of coloured labels - the gray labels won't display on the front of the cards. That way, your team can just keep the coloured labels for departments.

Debbie Stephenson · Answer

Thank you @Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows for your reply. I figured that adding a checklist was probably the best way to track a milestone, but I was not aware of dependency cards, which is very useful to know, so thank you!

In regards to my second question about filtering via the Dashboard. Yes, I am talking about in the workspace views. However, we are using the Labels feature currently to label which department within our organisation a card belongs to. I'm therefore unable to use labels to correspond with a milestone as it will cause confusion. I wish we were able to filter by a Custom Field. That way, we could filter by Status and have a very clear view of what was In Progress or not.

Do you know if this is possible, or have any other suggestion?

Cheers,

Debbie

Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows · Answer

Hi @Debbie Stephenson ! Welcome to the community :)  to answer your first question, there are a few different ways to approach this! If the goal is to track the completion percentage of a milestone to understand how it's progressing, one idea could be to use a checklist with linked cards (dependency cards) setup with butler automation.

It could look something like this:

Basically, you would have a "header card" at the top of each list which would represent the milestone card. Within that card, you can list all related deliverables in the checklist. Any item added to the "Deliverables" checklist within the milestone card will turn into a "linked card". When a card is completed, it will check off the corresponding checklist item. That way, you can see the milestone progression (circled in green).

You can read more about dependencies here: https://help.trello.com/article/1165-task-dependencies

For your second question, you can filter cards based on what list they're in (assuming you're talking about the workspace views when you say "dashboard"?). You can also set up your dependencies so that the "linked cards" inherit a label with the milestone name, so that way you can filter on that label if you're looking for cards related to a specific milestone.