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Best Way to Cancel Projects and Put Projects On Hold

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Level 8
I'm reviewing some of my mid-year cleanup reports and I'm noticing that not all of our system admins cancel and put projects on hold the same way. Before I establish a best practice / rule for how we cancel and put projects on hold, and communicate this out to our system admins, I'm just curious to hear how people handle these two project statuses. The way I cancel a project: - Flip status to Cancelled - Delete all tasks that have zero hours logged. - If tasks have time logged, I had been marking as done/100% complete. logged as 100%. - However, I recently started using a view on my tasks tab that shows the task status next to the % complete, and noticed that if you cancel the task, it changes the % complete to 100, so I started doing that instead. Is this a reasonable process, anyone have any suggestions? How I put a project On Hold - Flip status to On Hold - Remove users from active tasks, keep job roles. - I think I was removing the user from active tasks they were assigned to, because otherwise those tasks would still show up on their my work page and users didn't want them to. I'm not sure if this has changed with Home, it's been a while since I've tested this, so again, just curious to hear how other system admins put projects on hold. Thanks for your time! Sydney Peterson Diversified Communications, Inc.
6 Replies

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Level 10
I just change the status to on hold or cancel on our projects - i don't do any other modifications, nor do I delete anything related to the project, users, hours, - nothing - I leave all in the state it is, for the sake of history. Benetta Perry APS

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Level 8
After a month or so after we first implemented Workfront, I noticed that when a Project was put "On Hold", it did not remove the assigned tasks from an individual's My Work "Working On" list. We quickly realized that the Project "On Hold" status was just that - a visual status indicating On Hold, but it did not remove anything from anybody's task list. So, we created a custom project status called "On Hold Pending", which equates to "Dead" on the back-end. Now, when Project is moved to this status, it removes all tasks from an individual's Working On list. On My Work, it tells the individual that the Task/Project has been changed to "Dead" status and that they can Remove it from their list. We then taught all of our Project Owners, then if/when the project is ready to be picked back up, that they change the Project from On Hold Pending to Planning, make any adjustments that they need to make (reassign tasks, change planned completion date, etc.) and then once everything is all set to change the Project to Current status. Terry Hynd EBSCO Information Services

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Level 3
Thanks Terry! I like the idea that create a custom project status called "On Hold Pending", which equates to "Dead" on the back-end. Thanks! Md Rahman Administrator, IT Application Freedom Mortgage Cell -8565226998 E: md.rahman@freedommortgage.com

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Level 10
We don't delete any tasks when we cancel a project either. We use "Cancelled" 'On Hold" and then we created a custom status 'Needs to be deleted" to flag projects that were test projects, dummy data, etc that then only the Sys Admins can actually delete. Katherine Haven, PMP VP, Director, Business Technologies - PMO FCB

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Level 1
Sydney - I use a similar method to you, when there is a task in a project that is on hold or has a TBD due date - I simply remove the assignee so that they are not constantly asking why they cannot start that task. I feel like the "HOLD" status should actually do more - like remove those tasks from the assignee's task list until made active again. Etc. It would be nice to see the projects on HOLD as a true hold - where they are somewhat invisible in the system other than to the project owners and the sys admins. In addition to this - I think this is super frustrating to not have a way to add a TBD date to a task or to archive old projects. @Workfront Support - Please put this on the list for a release. Libby Melton Arrow Digital Marketing

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Level 1
This is great! I just commented on how frustrating it is to have Hold not really reflect hold. Thank you for the super helpful tip! Libby Melton Arrow Digital Marketing