Undo Button for All Project Functions

The recycle bin is only for if you delete items. We have users who want to undo movement of tasks or changes of dates - they haven't deleted anything - just made some small error that altered the whole project and can take a ton of time to manually undo. We want to be able to back out that activity.

Some of our users really struggle with the interface when trying to re-order and organize tasks. The indention/hierarchy isn't clear to them, sometimes they have to refresh the screen for their changes to appear correctly, sometimes lag results in something going to the wrong place, and sometimes there is just plain user error.

The ability to undo changes is critical and considered core functionality on our side.

If it's not possible to provide the ability to go back step by step, a snapshot/commit feature would be nice. In practice it would be similar to making a copy and deleting it once the changes are accepted but it would work much more cleanly and wouldn't require giving everyone permission to delete projects.

The UI is a huge pain point with our project managers. A simple action like dragging and dropping tasks, becomes cumbersome because if they hover over the new location just a second too long, instead of the task just being moved, it automatically makes everything underneath it a child task. This messes up all of their dates, etc. which results in a lot of manual effort to "fix" it back to the way it was. In-line edit functionality is great for somethings but project/schedule management is not one of them.

The other thing lacking that our PMs have problems with is the fact that when they are working on their project schedules, notifications, etc. are going out to team members and they haven't really had a chance to view the impact of the change they are making to the overall schedule. As a result, they could potentially send out numerous emails to team members until they get the schedule adjusted just right. Tool really needs a publish feature. The legacy gantt addresses some of this, but it is not ideal. A work-around was suggested by Workfront to alter the project status temporarily from in-flight to planning to suppress emails, however, this creates other issues if people are actively trying to run reports or if a resource is on the My Work tab and their tasks all of the sudden display a message that they no longer need to work on it. A better solution would be to have another tab that looks like the Tasks tab, but is actually a scratch pad for PMs to apply schedule maintenance and do some modeling to verify the impact of the changes to the overall schedule, before they actually apply the changes. Once they've verified their changes, have a "publish" button on the tab that would commit all of the updates to the DB and display on the regular Task tab.

Another one, PMs are tired of random forms attaching to their tasks. We have some old forms that are no longer used, however, because they contain a custom field that we ask them to populate on a standard task view that we have, Workfront takes the very 1st form ever created with that specific field on it and attaches it to the task. This also results in a lot of unnecessary maintenance. It would be nice it you could specify on the project the default custom form(s) that should be attached to a new Task or Issue that is added to a project.

Finally, PMs are tired of people logging time to tasks that have been marked complete. They have an extra report to monitor and then have to go back and follow-up with each person to get it corrected. It would be nice if Workfront would not allow users to log time to tasks that have been completed or better yet, not log time to tasks that have been completed beyond the Actual Completion Date.

Sorry, I know that on the surface some of the above may go beyond a basic "undo", but all of them result in additional maintenance that our PMs just don't have the time to do. So technically, they are "undoing" something whether it is changing the status to do maintenance, moving a task, dealing with the wrong custom form, or having time entry corrected...in the grand scheme of things they are all "undos".

I've opened ideas for most of these on this exchange, but it seems that its easier for people to open a duplicate suggestion rather than searching existing ones and voting them up or down. :)

current undo function is unfortunately not really helpful as the effort that was booked on the tasks are moved to the project level during deletion and the undo just restores the tasks without the efforts

Adding a comment to reference this other request related to the undo capability.

https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115003983693-Add-an-undo-or-back-button

Our project managers are highly frustrated that there is no undo button. It is so easy to make a mistake and deleting something from your plan! An undo button is one of the most basic functionalities you can find using a software...

Implementing this could prevent a lot of frustration and challenges!

Thank you for your ideas and feedback, everyone. As we build on the Recycle Bin capabilities, an "Undo" feature is planned for a future release. We are looking at key areas of the application where the ability to undo last action is most needed, such as the Task list. Look for further updates in our quarterly product roadmap calls.

The project plan interface should include CTRL-Z,X,C,V. These functions are the basic entry level for any application, including web-based. The current interface is so bad, and so open to catastrophic mistakes, that my staff seldom update the task list after the first baseline. I use MS Project to create tasks lists for new templates and then import them for the same reason: in Workfront, hours of work can be wiped out by the slip of a finger during a drag-and-drop.

We need that button!