Project lifecycles - how are you doing it?
As a consulting firm, we have projects that evolve, change and morph over time. We currently track our Proposal efforts via tasks in Wrike (a single task for each is sufficient), and we also track our Projects via Wrike Projects. This works well, but there are a fair bit of manual steps along the way.
Often, we will have several Projects that follow on each other (for example a Feasibility Study, then Capital Cost Estimate, Preliminary Engineering, Detail Design, etc.). Sometimes they follow each other as one Project all together under one Proposal, other times each phase is a separate Project with their own Proposals - years apart! We also obviously do not have a 100% win rate, so there are many Proposals that end up lost or cancelled, so putting the effort into creating a project for each and have the Proposal as merely the first Task within is not worth it. It would also flood the Projects folders with too many dead Projects that never made it. So for now we manually create and link them together with permalinks.
It would be ideal if we could automate the process a bit. For example, if I mark a Proposal task (already marked as Complete) as Awarded, it would be great if this could trigger the creation of a new Project in the appropriate Projects Folder, and pre-populate it with information already entered in Custom Fields from the Proposal Task.
Maybe we're approaching this in the wrong way? Or perhaps some-one out there has solved this use-case already with a novel approach. Maybe there's some Wrike functionality I don't know about!
Any advice or best practices would be appreciated...
Following as I have a similar process that I am trying resolve. One thought I have is use a request form to create the new project, but have not thought about your need of moving custom field data.
The automation to create a project can be done via Wrike Integrate and maybe that could help populate the custom fields. I still need to test this process.
Just a few thoughts - by default if you are using Request Form to build a project (folder or tasks) from Blueprints - you may be able to build the "general" structure of the project, and by default (set in blueprint) - set everything to and on hold or deferred custom workflow (like Pending SOW approval, or something like that) - and the Project workflow should also reflect that it is not awarded either.
Then there may be some solutions that you can use automation rules - like if Project gets "approved" moved to "XX" location, changes task statuses, or even change the task workflow to "XX" custom workflows.
I think there may also be some great answers for you with Automation Rules: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005220042-Available-Automation-Triggers
and using customing workflow: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005876769-Auto-Assigning-Tasks-Based-on-Workflow-Status
Custom Item Types - might also be worth looking into further as well, as Wrike has really built in some SUPER flexible ways to adjust Wrike to fit YOUR system/processes - https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409188763031-Custom-Item-Types-in-Wrike
We do not use automatic. We have blueprints for each project type we are using. Nevertheless project manager have to customize any project as it is in our company each project is quiet different. So we are using the blueprints with the you should not forget things, but everything else still must be done by people.
The project flow itself is made by hand and we have a restricted change of status with approvals. That is quiet easy to set up in the workflow.
Ditto what Sherrie mentioned. I'm not aware of a feature that will copy custom fields unless it was just duplication of the project which wouldn't help you. I think having a blueprint with all aspects of what the project can turn it but putting those "on hold" or "N/A" status as default until those areas move forward or cancel out. If the projects don't move forward, you may want to remove those to keep # of task down. Automation can be your best friend as well.
Well, have you thougt about duplicating an "awarded" project? There are several options when duplicating, you can choose to copy custom filed values, but not to copy due dates and assignees, for example. Of course this will leave so cleanup work, but it could be easier to delete some items instead of reenter several data.