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Why can a project be deleted if the tasks/issues have hours and the admin setup prevents deletion of tasks and issues with hours? It seems like this is just a miss in following through on the logic, right?

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Level 7

In the setup area under Project Preferences > Tasks & Issues, an admin can choose to allow or prevent deletion of tasks and issues with logged hours. My company does NOT allow for task/issue deletion if they have logged hours. This prevents folks from deleting things without having the necessary conversations to get time moved where it needs to go.

However, you can still delete the entire project - which is deleting the tasks/issues along with it! This seems like an oversight. If a company doesn't want tasks/issues deleted if they have hours, why would they ever want the whole project deleted instead?

I think Workfront needs to address this in the administrative setup. Either this single checkbox prevents project deletion as well or there needs to be another checkbox to prevent project deletion. There's literally no way to control whether someone deletes a project with time or not.

The hours are not permanently deleted - they're actually bumped to the General Hours line on a users timesheet. But this forces everyone down a path of correcting this type of mistake by hand for all users impacted (for all weeks impacted).

This obviously has huge impacts to reports as well. Want to know where your team was utilized? You won't be able to tell when this happens until after the time-consuming effort of fixing someone's simple mistake.

This seems like a pretty simple thing to fix. Can we get that in the roadmap?

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1 Accepted Solution

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Correct answer by
Employee

Thank you @Jeremy Flores‚ .

@David Gutzmann‚ thank you for your patience while this found its way into development. It's currently being worked on so keep an eye on the feature announcements for the upcoming weeks.

Kind regards,

Anna

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8 Replies

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Community Advisor

Hi David,

I'd suggest you navigate to Setup > Access Levels, and for each one except those authorized (perhaps SysAdmins only, for example), edit the Access Level, scroll down to Projects, click the Edit button, and UNcheck the box beside "Delete", thereby preventing (accidental) deletion of Projects...irrespective of whether time has been entered.

Regards,

Doug

Hi Doug, appreciate the reply. We allow our plan license users to delete their own projects because there is a need for them to work autonomously and manage these steps rather than restricting them and forcing this into an administrative duty someone else has to perform for them. So while the suggestion could work, it's most definitely not the optimal solution. I think my argument here still stands, the current functionality does not logically make sense and seems like an oversight/lack of follow-through that's easily fixed.

If the system allows the restriction of deleting an object (task/issue) based on the object having actual hours logged, it does not make sense to allow deletion of the parent object (projects) if the child objects have actual hours logged.

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Community Advisor

Understood David; that makes sense.

In that case, I suggest you adopt the convention of periodically creating at least one Billing Record to every project (either manually, or using our Auto-Bill solution), since by doing so, Workfront will then prevent any such accidental project deletions.

If need be, PMs can (carefully) delete such Billing Records, move any existing time elsewhere, and (only) then delete the Project.

Regards,

Doug

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Employee

Hey David,

This sounds like the perfect thing to add to the Innovation Lab so it can start getting votes from fellow customers. Are you an authorized support contact? (You need to be to submit an idea to the Innovation Lab) I'll also tag @Jeremy Flores‚ who is over the Innovation Lab so he can keep an eye on your idea once you submit it!

Thanks,

Kyna

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Employee

@David Gutzmann‚ thanks for the feedback and for submitting the idea. This does sound like an oversight and is already on our roadmap.

cc. @Anna Asatryan‚

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Correct answer by
Employee

Thank you @Jeremy Flores‚ .

@David Gutzmann‚ thank you for your patience while this found its way into development. It's currently being worked on so keep an eye on the feature announcements for the upcoming weeks.

Kind regards,

Anna

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Employee

Just wanted to provide another update here. The functionality is currently available in preview environment. It's available only for the NWE users. Feel free to review and let me know if you have any questions/concerns.