Problem

ClickUp currently lacks a flexible way to manage and track portfolios of distributed projects or initiatives while maintaining custom attributes and automatically aggregated progress.

Our use case:

We have an Initiative Overview list that tracks approximately 40 company-wide initiatives. Each initiative is managed independently in a department-specific Space/List, where teams execute their work.

In the central overview, we want to track:

Progress: Automatically calculated from the tasks within each linked initiative list (e.g., 18/25 tasks completed, 72%)

Status: Overall initiative health and execution status

Custom Fields: Strategic goals, stakeholders, owners, priorities, budgets, etc.

Reporting: Centralized dashboards showing progress across all initiatives

We have the exact same challenge with customer onboarding projects: Each customer has a dedicated onboarding list, while a central controlling list tracks commercial and operational information across all onboarding projects.

Why Existing Functionality Isn't Sufficient

Portfolio Views are a step in the right direction, but they don't offer the flexibility of regular tasks, particularly when it comes to assigning arbitrary custom fields and managing rich project metadata.

Relationships and Rollups are powerful, but they operate at the task level. We cannot create a relationship to an entire List and roll up its aggregated task progress.

This forces us to maintain parallel tracking structures, manually update progress, or introduce unnecessary workarounds.

Proposed Solution

We see two possible approaches:

Option 1: Allow Relationships to Entire Lists (Preferred)

Extend ClickUp Relationships so that a task can reference an entire List, not just another task.

For example, an item in our Initiative Overview could link directly to the corresponding department initiative list.

The overview task could then automatically display or roll up:

Total tasks and completed tasks

Percentage of tasks completed

Overdue and blocked tasks

Milestone progress

Other aggregated metrics from the linked list

All existing task-level capabilities, such as Custom Fields, ownership, descriptions, statuses, automations, and dashboard reporting, would remain available.

Option 2: Make Lists First-Class Portfolio Objects

Alternatively, substantially expand Portfolio Views so that Lists behave more like regular tasks.

A List should support:

Arbitrary Custom Fields, directly assigned to the List

Owners, stakeholders, goals, and other metadata

Custom statuses and health indicators

Progress metrics calculated from its underlying tasks

Full support in dashboard widgets, filtering, grouping, sorting, and automations

Conceptually, a List would become another type of parent item, with its own metadata and aggregated progress, rather than merely a container for tasks.

Expected Outcome

We want to build centralized, fully customizable portfolio trackers without moving or duplicating the underlying work.

Teams should continue working in their own Spaces and Lists, while leadership, project management, and controlling can track dozens or hundreds of distributed initiatives or customer projects through one central view.

The key requirement: Combine the flexibility of a regular ClickUp task (Custom Fields, relationships, automations) with the aggregated progress and hierarchy of an entire List.

This would be a major improvement for strategic initiative management, customer onboarding, PMOs, cross-department project portfolios, and enterprise-wide reporting.