I'd love to see automations gain the ability to update parent project statuses based on task-level criteria, such as task status changes, custom field values, or completion of specific milestones.
Today, automations can update subitem statuses, but there is no equivalent way to feed status changes upstream from tasks to their parent projects. For teams managing complex work, this makes it difficult to maintain meaningful project statuses without significant manual effort.
Because manually monitoring and updating project statuses is so time consuming, we've intentionally simplified our workflows to use only a few project statuses: New Request, In Progress, and Completed in most cases. While this reduces administrative overhead, it also limits visibility into where work actually stands.
For example, when an intake task is completed, we would love to automatically move the parent project from New Request to In Progress (yes, we have a custom field indicating which tasks are considered "intake"). Similarly, when a task representing website publication is completed, we'd like the project to reflect a Published status (again, that same custom field indicates publication tasks). However, many projects remain open after publication because there is still follow-up work to complete, such as email sends, social promotion, reporting, or ongoing maintenance (all of which get categorized in the same custom field).
Without the ability to automate project status updates from task activity, it's difficult to provide meaningful visibility at the project level. As a result, dashboards and reports often show a long list of "active" projects, but users still need to open each project individually to understand what stage it has reached or whether key deliverables have been completed.
The ability to update project statuses automatically based on task criteria would help teams:
- Provide more accurate project-level reporting
- Surface meaningful progress in dashboards
- Reduce manual status maintenance
- Better represent milestone completion while allowing downstream work to continue
Question for the community:
How are others managing projects where a major milestone (such as a website launch or content publication) is completed, but the project remains open for additional work?
Have you found effective ways to provide meaningful status visibility without creating multiple connected projects or relying on manual status updates?
