Wrike Tip - Clean Reporting using Custom Fields
In our organization, reporting needs change based on time of year due to our development cycle flow. Because milestone tasks are fixed after duplicating the project template, we found that using milestones within our project template would cause excess manual editing of multiple project schedules due to the quantity of tasks we need to report on and how the timelines can fluctuate based on project complexity. Additionally, we don't always wish to report out all milestones, only the milestones we are interested in given the time of year.
To demonstrate how we resolved this, I have created a simple project template with preassigned custom fields (see image below).
I added a custom field titled "MILESTONE" as a drop-down with two categories to choose from (in this simplified example): "Design" and "Pilot Run". You can add as many categories as you need to your drop-down list to assist with filtering only the tasks you are interested in viewing. For example, in the middle of our development phase we would like to report on the status of all tasks assigned the "Design" milestone category for all projects. When generating the report, you can filter by custom field. In the below example, I selected the "MILESTONE" custom field and only checked the box next to "Design" in the filters column.
Now I see just the milestone I am interested in, grouped by project. Later in the year, I just want to see the "Pilot Run" task status. Now you would simply select the checkbox next to Pilot Run only...
...which yields the following report:
In summary, using custom fields to assign different categories to specific tasks can give your reports the flexibility you may be looking for. If you would like to see how I grouped by project name using "Parent Folder" grouping, check out my post on "Clean Reporting with Multiple Projects".
I hope you found this to be helpful with your reporting challenges. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, I would love to see it in the comments section below.
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing this, Trevor. I will definitely have a closer look and see how this fits into our reporting needs and workflow.
Unfortunately, the Screenshots you posted appear as broken links. Would you mind trying to put them up again? I assume they would help a lot in understanding your detailed elaborations.
@all, I'm working with Wrike support to get the images back up. I apologize for the issue.
Cheers!