Using a Backlog portfolio to store waterfall projects for later consideration.

[AMBRNA]

We have the following high-level annual project portfolio planning steps:

1) Requestor submits request

2) Requestor's manager approves/or declines the request

3) For approved requests, the portfolio manager converts the request to a project

4) Collectively, the projects are discussed at the Steering committee

5) The Steering committee selects one of the following for Projects activities are the following:

a) Approved to move forward

b) Declined

c) Held for additional information

d) Moved to the backlog

The part of the process not working well is pulling projects out of the backlog. It appears that once they're converted to a project, there's no option to resurrect them as a request and go back through the approval process.

The question is, can a project be turned back into just a request or are there any other suggestions to have the requester be able to pull it out of a project backlog, make desired changes and resubmit the request after it's been converted to a project?  

[Madalyn_Destafney]

You're correct that you can't take a converted project back to a request. If it was already approved before it got to the backlog, I take it you want to just account for any changes in the issue/project custom form info before it becomes a real project. In that case, you could make project updates, then add an issue to that routes for approval to review the updated the project the issue is in? Then if approved (again), move project to correct portfolio and proceed?

[skyehansen]

if you have any wiggle room at all in this process, I’d suggest doing step three at the very end. In other words, nothing should be converted until the steering committee looks at it. Backlogged requests can be moved to a backlog project if you’d like.

if there’s no wiggle room, is it possible for the requester to ask for the backlog project to be canceled, and then use workfront’s resubmit request functionality to basically make a copy of their submitted request and resubmit it with the changes?

[Richard__Carlson]

If your system is configured to preserve the originating issue it would be a matter of finding that issue and converting it to a different project.  If your system is set to delete originating issues then you might be out of luck.

I have a suggestion.  Instead of converting those bunk requests to projects why don't you tag them with a specific status?  You could create reporting to either reveal or hide requests with this status.  Personally, it doesn't make much operational sense to me to convert bunk issues to projects just to preserve them within the system.  It is additional steps for a non-gain, again, IMHO.

You could build a report which shows requests that have the new special status that you defined.

[AMBRNA]

Yes, we do have the originating issue. I hadn't thought about re-converting to a project. I think that may do the trick for us. Right now, I'm thinking of marking the original project as dead, then reconverting the issue to a project. I get a warning that it was already converted and will write over the initial project resolution, but that's what we'd want. Thank you!

As a side note, the reason we convert the DAP to a project after initial champion approval instead of waiting until after the steering committee approval is because we're better able to analyze the project data. That is, the view filtering is more robust, and we have the resource planner.