Custom Project Status
This has been a request for a long time. CAN WE GET AN UPDATE??
Here's my 2¢.
I am wondering what it would take to give Project Status a way to be customized much the same way that Custom Workflows do. Here's the idea... We are a very customized creative shop and have very specific Project Statuses that are unique from the Task Statuses. Since there are a limited list of Project Statuses available, it would be nice to have a custom option like the Workflow does.
When I'm setting up reports, I want to be able to show the current status of a project in more detail than Green, Red, Yellow, Completed, On Hold or Cancelled.
It would be nice to be able to EITHER indicate a certain stage like "In Print" "Pending Payment" or Proofing" as a dropdown and/or a text entry...
OR automatically reference the current task in the dependency (gantt chart) or another field selection.
For example, if the project has 10 tasks that are in order and connected by dependency (which 99% of ours are), then the project status could be setup to retrieve the name of the current task or the name of the most recent completed task. So if tasks 1, 2, and 3 have been completed, then the status would automatically show task 4 as the current task at hand.
As I'm sure some have mentioned, the task status report is tedious to view and provides more information that is necessary for a manager or even a client-side report. Because the real question from the manager or client is,
"Where are we on this project? What is the STATUS?"
And the answer can never be, "Well, Bob, it looks like it's Green." And we can also not say, "Well, Step 1 is Complete, Step 2 is Complete, Step three is In Progress, etc..."
It would be much better to simply be able to scan the report and see an easy summary of what the actual status is by project... not every single task.
I realize that not all companies have the same need as ours, but I can bet you that the project status report telling everyone that the projects are GREEN is not cutting it.
Give us some control there if possible.
I would dream of having this availability lol.
We are a design/build firm so it makes reporting essentially non-useful for me.
We have projects that are in Conceptual Design, Design Development, Construction Documents, Pre-Construction, and Construction. We set up folders so people would move projects to let us know the status but no one moves them, so it doesnt work out well.
But if the status feature could be customized and linked to reporting that would be huge
Hey Shawn and Ivan,
There's a thread already for custom project statuses here: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115003092949--Status-Coming-Soon-Customising-Project-status. According to the tag, it will be available soon.
Ivan — The workaround for us right now is a custom field in the table that has drop downs identical to our tasks, but also allows text entry. It's another step for us to fill just so reports can show. It's not ideal, but it helps the report.
Shawn those status ideas are brilliant. That would help us tremendously. However, I guess I will wait on this as if the feature is coming out soon I would rather just implement once in the permanent setup
What is it ??? a custom status for projects ?
(at 9'38'')
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQVmq6sgW9w&t=22s
@Ron Hey, thanks for reaching out! I think those are Custom Statuses for tasks, not projects.
@Everyone, quick update: Custom Project Statuses are going to be rolled out to everyone by the beginning of Q3 🎉
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
I'm testing Wrike's Project Status solution, and so far I am encouraged. I think it helps with the reporting and summary issues many users have mentioned. At least you can have a report that shows the true Project Status rather than GREEN, RED, YELLOW, ETC... And being able to assign a workflow much the same as the task workflow is pretty much what I was looking for.
The only thing I'm missing at this point in my assessment is the ability for Wrike to somehow follow the task status progress and map it (per admin preference) to a corresponding project status automatically. Does that make sense?
In other words, when a certain task or a set of tasks is completed, the project's overall status would automatically move to the next status level or dependent status chosen by the admin.
As it stands, the Project status function works the same as the task status function.
Let's say that a project is in the Design Phase (status). The tasks may be something like Initial Design, Internal Check, Client Review, Revision 1, Client Approval... Once the final task of that phase (or status) is complete (Client Approval), the next task or set of tasks (Production, Printing, or whatever) would make up the next Project Status (In Production or Fabrication) and the project would automatically be moved into that status.
Allowing for manual changes or insertions would, of course, be necessary, but hopefully, you get the idea. The ability to map your tasks to Project Status would make the overall project status move along automatically without being another box the check.
I welcome anyone to clarify or illustrate this idea a little better. I'm a little foggy today...
@lisa how can we get access to the Custom Project Statuses feature? We really need this too. Thanks to @shawn for his brilliantly clear articulation of why this feature was so necessary! No more obscure, open-to-wide-interpretation statuses such as GREEN, YELLOW etc. Yay!
+1 This feature would help our business as well. At this stage we don't use it at all - we have to create a dummy task in each project which is the "status holder".
Any update?
I am creating a dummy task, to share current project's status as a workaround.
Lisa said it would be launched by starting of Q3 of this year, but Q4 is just around the corner.
Have you merged Workflow status with Projects status? This is horrible!
How can I change this?
@Zohar Ma
Thy have added the custom workflows to projects. It works fine in our system but it looks like yours went through some kind of erroneous merge.
Thanks for the heads up that this is live, I had been hanging out for this one! I guess my notification of go-live is still in the post.
Hi everyone, thanks a lot for your patience with this! Custom project statuses should be now rolled out to all accounts! 😁 If you don't see the feature in your account or have any issues, please reach out to our Support team at https://help.wrike.com/hc/requests/new.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
So this is cool and all, but where can we set the default project status workflow now that we have the option to change it? All new projects we create use the default task workflow that's set up and require it to be manually changed every time a new project is created.
Thank you, Wrike, for this feature.
As per Shawn's post above, can Wrike continue to improve? It would be helpful to run reports reflecting the status of the project based on the next actionable task. For ex. if "collect assets and copy" have been received and marked complete, next task would be design. The design task would then be marked 'in progress'. I don't know if I explained this clearly.
Hello, are the custom statuses working? How can I add/change the statuses? I've gone through all the specs but didn't find anything. Thanks
Hi Tomáš Sipos, welcome to the Community!
We have a guide on Custom Workflows, explaining step-by-step how to create and use Custom Workflows in Wrike.
All users on Business and Enterprise accounts can use custom workflows and statuses, but workflows can only be created or edited by an account admin through the account management section.
Please let me know if you have any questions 🙋🏻♀️