Report of Project Active Date

[chank22]

Does anyone know if it is possible to capture when a project was turned Active? I need to capture the start date ("Active" date of project) to get cycle time of our team.

Also, does anyone know if I can combine or collect a specific date/ field from a custom form within a task?

[Richard_Le_]

Hi Chank,

This is possible, but it depends how you are measuring when the project was turned active. A couple of options spring to mind:

1. Natively in Workfront, there is a field called actualStartDate which will record when the project first started to be worked on (measured as the date/time that the first task was marked as in progress).
2. If you are measuring the "active date" as the date when the project was set to "current", you could create a calculated field that records a timestamp when the status was first set to a "current" status. 

Not sure I fully understand your second question. Can you expand a little on the use case and what you are trying to achieve and i'll do my best to help?

Best Regards,

Rich. 

[chank22]

Hi Rich, 

Thanks for the reply! In regards to the the actual start date you mentioned, is it true that this date captures when the first task was marked as in progress even if the project isnt "Active" yet? The reason this is important is because we have reviewers who are assigned to a project managers' project. We are looking to capture the date that the project is available for reviewers to provide feedback on. Hence, if the actual start date does not take into account whether the project is "Active"/viewable to reviewers, I am still lost as to how to capture the start of the cycle time for reviewers.

As for my 2nd question, I want to capture a date (the "end" date) in a custom form that project managers fill out. This custom form falls under a task in the project. I wonder if this information can be captured. Given the limitations of Workfront reports, I wonder whether this data can be capture on the same report as the above "Active" date. 

Thanks.

[Richard_Le_ · Accepted solution]

No Problem.

Yes, the actual start date is captured as soon as the first task is marked as In Progress, even if the project isn't "active". To record an active date there needs to be some sort of an action or trigger in Workfront for it to capture the date. My recommendation would be that either a project review task is created and reviewers mark it as in progress when they start their review to update the actualStartDate. Alternatively, create a custom project status (something like "In review"), and then we could capture the date that the project was put into this status using a calculated field.

As for your second question, I'm guessing that you are using a project-type report. You could pull the date of a specific task into a column in this report as long as it has a consistent custom field attached to it. Below is some example code that you could repurpose.

displayname=End Date
listdelimiter=
listmethod=nested(tasks).lists
textmode=true
type=iterate
valueexpression=IF(!ISBLANK({DE:End Date}),{DE:End Date},"")
valueformat=HTML

What this code is effectively doing is iterating through all of the tasks within a project and locating any task that has a "End Date" custom field attached to it that is not blank. If it is not blank, it will return the value captured within the End Date field. If the field is not attached to a task or if it is blank, it wont return any value. 

I hope this helps.

Best Regards,

Rich