Setting goals for your project is crucial for creating alignment within your team and among stakeholders to ensure that everyone knows what top work is most important and how it is being prioritized. The new Goals in Microsoft Project feature allows you to easily set and track goals for your project, and even link them to tasks within your project to ensure that the work you have defined aligns with your goals.
How to Access Goals
To get started, navigate to Goals view in your Project by selecting Goals in the header.
Here, you can add goals by clicking on the “Add goal” button and adding some initial details, like the goal title, end date, status, and a unique color.
Once you have your goals defined, you can add additional details by clicking into a goal and adding a description, start date, and priority.
To help track progress towards reaching your goal and ensure that you have the right amount and type of investment towards each, you can link related tasks to your goals. This will help you track if any goals are at risk due to tasks that are falling behind, see where investment is needed, and help bring clarity to the team about how their work is helping to achieve a wider goal.
Goals in Other Views
Board View
In the Board view, you can group by goal to see how tasks are distributed among goals and see if there are any tasks that are not helping to achieve your set goals. From here you can redistribute tasks, add new tasks to goals, and even make edits to the goals themselves by clicking on their title.
You can also filter by goal in the Board view to see a subset of tasks that are aligned to your goal of focus.
People View
In the People view, you can also group or filter by goal. This allows you to see who is responsible for achieving which goals, so you know who to follow up with if there are questions about the state of a goal.
You can also filter by goal in the People view to see a subset of tasks that are aligned to your goal of focus.
Grid View
In the Grid view, you can add a Goal column to easily see which goal a task is linked to. You can also filter by goal to see a subset of tasks that are aligned to your goal of focus.
Charts View
In the Charts view, you can filter by Goal to see analytics of how tasks working toward your goal of focus are burning down. This is especially helpful to get a quick understanding of the state of a goal.
Coming Soon: Viva Goals in Project for the web
With Viva Goals, organizations can set clear goals based on strategic priorities to improve clarity and focus. Soon, you will be able to create and align strategic goals from Viva Goals with execution in Project for the web. After you align a project to OKRs in Viva Goals , you will be able to track progress automatically in Viva Goals so your stakeholders are kept informed while ensuring your team has context of the bigger picture as they complete work in Project for the web.
FAQs:
Who can view, create, and edit my project’s goals?
Users with a Project Plan 1, 3, or 5 license can view, create, and edit goals within a project. Users with only an M365 license who are invited to your project will be unable to see or interact with your goals in any way.
Is there a limit to how many goals I can create?
Each project is limited to 10 goals. This limit is created intentionally to encourage best practices for creating goals, where each project has a limited set of objectives that it is looking to achieve. Setting too many goals is overwhelming and often unachievable; limiting your project to 3-5 well scoped goals ensures the highest level of focus to drive success for your project.
Which tasks can I link to goals?
Any task which is not a summary task can be linked to a goal. Additionally, each task can only be linked to one goal at a time.