How to Build a Project Roadmap in Asana or Wrike

How to Build a Project Roadmap in Asana or Wrike

Published in Apps on , last updated .

What’s a project roadmap? It’s a summary of the most important tasks within several projects. In other words, all the key information within the projects that your teams are working on, is combined into one roadmap project. You can monitor this roadmap project to understand what’s going on within multiple projects, and keep track of everyone’s progress.

A project roadmap is automatically updated with any information on the projects your teams are working in. This means you don’t have to ask anyone for status updates, and can simply monitor the high level roadmap instead. Everyone’s updates will automatically be shown there.

By creating a roadmap that connects all the projects your team members are working on, you won’t have to hold status meetings to know what’s going on: your roadmap is a live view of what’s happening. It helps you manage the work between multiple teams, and helps ensure fewer instances of tasks dropped and handoffs missed. This will improve cross-departmental collaboration, create a clear view of everyone’s progress, and pinpoint problems before they have time to leave any long-term damage.  

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create a project roadmap in Asana and Wrike:

Asana Roadmaps

Asana recently added a few customizable fields to make creating roadmaps even easier. You can now adapt your favourite tool to your company’s workflow!

Create a separate project/folder and name it “roadmap”. Since tasks in Wrike and in Asana can exist in more than one project at a time, you can multihome (putting the same task in multiple projects at once) any tasks you’ve synced, into many projects. Tasks will then be visible from both the individual project your team members are working on, and also in the roadmap project. If you only select important tasks to multihome – either especially large tasks or tasks on which many other tasks are dependent – you’ll have your roadmap set up in a flash.

Going beyond placing tasks in multiple projects, you can take advantage of Asana’s power user features to get even more out of your planning. Add Milestones to keep track of a team’s main focus and deadlines. Add Dependencies to keep track of task priorities.

A screenshot of dependencies in Asana.

Asana offers both a Calendar View and a DashboardView of roadmaps.

A screenshot of the calendar view in Asana.
A screenshot of Asana's dashboard view.

Wrike Roadmaps

The simplest version of a roadmap works basically the same way as in Asana.

Create tasks and assign them to more than one folder. You can choose only the most important tasks from one folder to multihome into your roadmap folder, or you can pull all of the tasks from many folders into one overarching roadmap. You can customize your workflow however you like. 🙂

Wrike also allows you to set up customizable dashboards where you can track your project roadmap. It even lets you set up different boards for different portions of a project.

You can set up dashboards to help you visualize the work in varied ways. To set up a board, click on Dashboard in your left menu, then click Add Widget, and finally click Activity Stream in the drop-down menu.

To add the project manager widget, first return to your project folder. Then click the funnel at the top of the tasks list. A side menu will appear on the right, with a series of filter options. Go to Assigned and choose the the assignees you want to follow. This step will ensure you see tasks assigned to the managers you choose to follow.

You can also set up overdue widgets to keep track of  tasks which are falling behind schedule. To do that, return to your project folder and click the funnel at the top of the tasks list. A side menu will appear on the right with a series of filter options.  Go to Filter>Tasks to do>Overdue. 

You now have a live dashboard (project roadmap) showing cards from various synced projects! Anyone working on either of those projects can add tasks, move them from one list to another, comment, or add attachments. Depending on your sync settings, every new change will sync and be visible in your live dashboard. If you comment on a task in your live dashboard, other people will see your comment directly in the tool they are using (the tool your live dashboard was synced with) and be able to reply from there.

When working with multiple teams, creating a live project roadmap will prove itself to be immensely useful. Not only will it improve collaboration and efficiency, but will save you and your co-workers a heck of a lot of time.

Want additional help? Ask us anything, we’d love to chat.

What’s next after building your project roadmap in Asana or Wrike?