FAQ: Completing Projects
You’ve just finished your Project: all tasks have been marked completed (what a great feeling!), Reports have been generated, and you are ready to start working on your next big goal.
What happens to the finished Project? Projects stay in the same location in the Workspace and no data is automatically deleted. As you finish a Project there are a few things you can do.
Change the Status
Changing the Project status to “Completed” is the finishing note, it tells everyone that everything has been finished and there’s nothing left to do.
Quick Tip: Pull Reports based on Projects by status to see how much you’ve completed this week, month, or quarter.
Update the Project’s Description
This is optional, but if any key takeaways or conclusions were made based on the Project, you can summarize them in the Project’s description field. This can save teammates time if they ever need to quickly reference the Project in the future.
Archive the Project
Keeping too many completed Projects in their original locations may clutter up the Workspace, so to make it easy to distinguish between active and completed Projects, we recommend creating a special "Archive” Folder. Projects which you store here are easy to open and reference at any point in the future.
Quick Tip: Name the archive Folder “zArchive” so that it appears at the bottom of the Navigation panel.
If you change the project to "completed" however there are still active tasks on the project plan will those tasks still show up as to do or overdue? I want to confirm completing the project essentially closes out the project and tasks. Thanks
Hi Tracy, thanks for reaching out! Changes to the Project status don't affect the status of tasks, since tasks often belong to several Projects or Folders. It's possible to quickly change the status of all tasks in a Project to "Competed" with the help of Mass Editing:
Happy to answer any other questions!
When you mark a project as complete it disappears from your view. So once we move it into the archive folder it is practically invisible and actually pretty difficult get back up. This makes the completed feature useless for our team because we need to be able to click the drop down on the archive folder and see all of our past projects.
Hi Aubrey, thanks for posting 😊
If you set the task as Completed, it disappears only if your filter is set to only show a certain status that doesn't include 'Finished' tasks. Take a look at the below and let me know if I've completely misunderstood what you're looking to do here 😇
Hi Stephen,
Yeah - I'm not talking about tasks I'm talking about the newer feature of completing entire projects as a way to close them. When I mark a project as complete, remove it from the current folder, and add it to our archive folder it is not showing up. I know it is technically in there but the feature does not work for our team if we can't both mark a project complete and have it still show up in archive when someone expands the drop down list. The filter view you're showing only applies to tasks, not projects, unless I'm doing something incorrectly.
Hi Aubrey, sorry for the misunderstanding. I understand now, you're using the filtering option above your Folder tree and you now don't see Archive Project because they Completed. Your Archive Folder behaves just like any other Folder when using the Filter so you will need to review the Filter if you want to refer to Archived items in your Folder tree.
It's a very good point and we'll be sure to bring it to the attention of the Product Team for future review - thank you for the feedback and apologies for the misunderstanding 😇
I am having the opposite problem: Projects that I have archived are still visible to other users. My personal view and workspace is cleaned up, but other users can still see all of the projects that I have moved to the archive. My view is the top--projects all neatly in folders. My other users' view is the bottom--all of those projects that you see have been archived. Help??
Hi Jenny! This is such a great question. I think what's happening is that the "Archive" Folder isn't shared with your coworkers. If you share the Folder with teammates, their Workspace should be organized as well.
Hi Stephanie,
I have the same problem as Jenny with archived projects still visible to others. The solution you recommend of sharing the Archive folder with everyone will not work because not all of our partners (set up as collaborators) should see all of our projects. So throwing them into an Archive folder that everyone can access effectively gives everyone access to every completed project. It would also be too time consuming to set up a mirror folder/permission structure in our archive folder to ensure no one gets access to projects they should have access to.
It seems like Wrike should create a separate function for archiving projects and folders. When a project is archived, all sharing/permissions are preserved, but it is moved automatically from the main navigation section to an Archive system folder or section. That way, anyone who logs in can see their active projects in the navigation as normal, and their archived projects are separated, but they can still only see the projects they initially had access to.
Hi William, I totally understand where you're coming from and it's a good point!
It would be great to hear what Collaborators do with your Archived projects. This information helps when trying to think about a possible workaround/solution and how everyone in the account is using your Folder tree 👍
Hi Stephen,
Potentially, they could look at archived projects to find assets for reference for the next project (if it is a recurring type of project, such as an annual event). However, the system we recently moved from did not allow collaborators to see archived projects at all. Our workaround at the moment is to just unshare the project with everyone except our internal team after it is moved to the archive folder. So at a minimum, an archive process could just do this automatically. But I do think it would be useful to have the option to allow collaborators to continue to have access to archived projects.
I would like to second @William's initial solution of a means of "archiving" projects with all elements of sharing that were originally there preserved. There may be some ways to achieve what typical "archiving" is trying to accomplish, like having a "closed" area with Wrike creates, or simply moving the projects out of the regular left pane and table views. I think the "zArchive" folder solution is a real workaround that you guys should have solved with a built-in solution. I really don't like to be doing workarounds where I have to myself add letters, etc. to force sorting as part of the native solution, just seems like that is indicative of an incomplete tool.
In my situation, complete projects are very useful to view to see how a team performed in the past, view baselines and see how assumptions, vs. actual finish times, are trending. Especially as my team grows as I have a start-up. I definitely do not want to lose all visibility to complete projects.
Thanks guys for listening!
Sorry for building on an old thread but it seems to have some connection to what I am trying to do ... wondering if the active filter applies to sub-projects. We have a multi-layer project hierarchy and it seems that the filter to "show active" does not remove the completed projects ... everything is still listed. It seems that the filter is specific to tasks (?) but I'm not sure. We also have a complex workflow that we need to resolve but that's a story for a different day. My main question is why does a (sub)project still show in my list when the project status is set to "complete" and I filter to only "show active"? New to Wrike so still have my training wheels on!
Welcome to the Community Jason Ramm! 🙂
In Table View, it's possible to filter out the tasks and the projects using the filters:
Please let me know if that helps 🙌
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