Report on how long project sits in status

[CrystalH]

Hi we are looking to have a view/report on projects and how long they sit at certain status' in order to create efficiencies and reduce bottlenecks.

Is there a way to do this along with having an alert to notify when a project has sat at a certain status for x amount of days?

[Daniel_Clarke]

Hey @CrystalH - can you tell us more about you usecase? Are you changing the project status between each task? At milestones?

Your answer will help to guide the conversation to the best solution for you.

My quick thoughts, while you can use task tags for something like this they can get a little hairy if you have any inconsistency to your templates / new tasks added in. Best answer will likely be to use Fusion to automate the documenting of this into the project + completing the notifications. 

Another edge case solution that comes to mind is that through Data Connect you have a "snapshot" of every action on a project so you can retrospectively see status changes and make process improvements after the fact. Not quite what you're looking for but that is a new and helpful feature of the Data Connect feature!

[CrystalH]

Hi Daniel,

The use case would be when projects move into status changes such as: funding approval, publishing, feedback from stakeholders.

Would it be best to use milestones then grab a report based on that to understand how long projects are staying at each status or stage?

Thanks for looking into this!

[Daniel_Clarke · Accepted solution]

Milestones are a great way to solve for this as it acts as your baseline from the plan vs actual as well. If you want specific data fields you can report on in addition to the milestone visualization then the solution provided by @RowvillBh1 is a great option as well.

[RowvillBh1]

Hi @CrystalH,

Here's an attempt to solve this : 

1. Create a calculated field that will give you timestamps for each status you want to track. 

2. Let's say you want to calculate the time when your project moved to "Complete" status. You can use this formula - Complete_Date = IF(Status='CPL',IF(ISBLANK(Complete_Date),$$NOW,Complete_Date),Complete_Date)

3. Create more calculated fields for each status where you need the timestamp. 

4. Create another calculated field using WORKMINUTESDIFF to find out the difference between two timestamps. 

[Daniel_Clarke]

This is an excellent solution provided you will only enter each status once which sounds like it could work for @CrystalH's example.