Need text field for project status update

For each of my projects, I want to be able to add a comment on the project status.  The project status comments would be visible on reports and would show up in the feed.  The only way to track project status using a standard Wrike field is to use the 'status' dropdown but I want to have a way to add context to the project status (i.e. why it's now in red status vs. green).  

My work around is to add a custom field at the project level called 'Comments'.  When I update this field, I enter the date and my initials and the comments so I know when I provided the last update.  Then I copy and paste the info to the comments field so that I can see previous updates.  It's duplicate effort and I'm having to manually type in data that should be auto-populated based on my user login and timestamp.

If you can't add a standard text field for project status and add some functionality and standard reporting around this new field, then the alternate solution is to be able to add the last comment on the project to a report.    But I think this is a hacky workaround as well.

Hi Lindsey - I completely agree! We are doing the EXACT same thing for our projects. Ideally, I would like to see that Status Update field at the Project level created so when I enter the status update it automatically posts it to comments for the history. Then when I update that field it makes another comment (time/date/user stamp). 

Hi Lindsey and Bethany, I can really see the value here, thanks for posting! it sounds like one of the solutions would be for Custom Field data to be written to the comment stream. Are there any other types of Custom Fields which you think would be useful to write to the comments? Just to make sure I'm getting everything right, I want to make sure that you're looking for a way to include all of these data points in one place:

• Which status a Project was changed to
• Comments related to that status change
• Who made the change
• When the change was made

Let me know if I missed anything!

I totally agree with the above comments, and I find this very important when it comes to task updates and specially ability to monitor progress and see comments/updates that an Asignee was posting for his/her tasks. If we have comments and date/time stamp exported in a report we can see how much progress has been made and what has been done week by week, if we are reporting a progress on weekly basis.

I created a custom field called Last Update which I can then export to excel, but that unfortunately did not help. Each week when an Assignee want to add the latest update to the task (using this Last Update custom field), it needs to overwrite the previous Last update, and there is no date stamp, so we lose previous updates, which defeats the purpose.

'Add Comment' is great way to see progress and it has time stamp, but without a functionality to be able to export those comments it is almost impossible to create any project update reports directly from Wrike.

Leonila, that definitely makes sense, thanks for contributing here!

I agree with these comments.

I find when working with Projects and Tasks there are 4 communication channels.

1) Internal discussions (current comment stream)

2) Task and project activity status comments, which need reporting functionality i.e. this posting from Lindsey.

Maybe this could be achieved by when person comments the can "tag" the comment with a [latest status update] flag and reports could look for the last, by date/time tagged [Latest status update] and show only this one.

Comment stream has filter for comments only, perhaps it could have additional filter for [comments flagged to [latest status update]

3) External communications, typically emails with people, customers or suppliers outside of Wrike but created from within Wrike (Doesn't exist yet)

4) Each participants own private notes, reminders etc. that they don't want to bother other people with) (Doesn't exist yet)

It would be useful to be able to "tag" comment types and filter the comment stream by these.

Thanks

Paul

This is a feature that is definitely needed. Finding a way to report on the latest status with more context is important when having weekly status meetings.

Hi all, I really like this idea, thanks for posting. Can you please ensure you have upvoted it so we can give it more attention when speaking with the Product Team 🙌

If you can also share how you achieve this at the moment, so we can get the creative workaround juices stirring. You never know what you could teach someone else here, or learn from others way of working 🙃

Some apps I looked at like Teamwork, Asana, and Hive, otherwise I thought inferior to Wrike, had a nice ability to communicate around a project, and team as well - which would be at the "Space" level in Wrike.  When status of a project is changed, you are offered the ability to comment about what is behind the status.  Then, these apps have a project view page in which you can see both the status of all projects, as well as the most recent comment about that status update.  This is a great bird's eye view that I really wish Wrike had.  But I guess you'd need first to have comments that take place when Status changes in the first place!

One way I am trying to workaround this, per your request @Stephen for this type of info, is to use a custom field of "text" type, and then make sure my team manually enters text that is essentially the update.  This can be viewed nicely in the table view, and we use this when closing tasks, too.  This feature however would really help us out to get this less of a manual process:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002219625-View-latest-Project-comment-in-Table-view?page=1#community_comment_360008673394

So if the last comments were visible in the table, you could just comment in the regular comments area and you'd know that it would show up in this field in the table.  In fact, you could achieve this Bird's Eye View report I'm speaking of, in table view, by simply seeing the project's most recent status, and most recent comment, without the need to explicitly have a function of the status update being able to "be commented on" as is the theme of this request we're talking about here.

One more thing:  Since the "text" type Custom Field is the only available workaround in Wrike at the moment, it would also be nice if you could see the full text in the field, and that's covered here:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002456369-Show-full-Custom-Fields-text-in-Task-View

Hope that's helpful guys, and counting on seeing this coming to Production soon!

We have some update in this comments? I need exactly this for my work, and Wrike didn't pay any attention to all the people requesting

Hi Dani Simões, thank you for chiming in! I understand this feature would be of help, however, I'm afraid it's on the lower side of votes at the moment. You can learn more about how we process your feedback here. 

Please, rest assured that we will keep you informed in this thread if there are any improvements implemented 👍