Year Long Projects

Hi Ashley, Most of our projects are a year or longer. There shouldn't be much difference in managing them (other than they're longer �� ). What concerns or difficulty are you anticipating?

We keep those long projects in ONGOING status and so it's apparent if the task dates get whacky - the person can see it's ONGOING and therefore probably required some guessing of due dates for certain tasks upon setup - such as interview dates for a future article and not knowing when a physician would be available. Not sure that helps at all. I hope to hear what you are facing as a challenge so I can see other people's responses. Sharon Flynn University of Virginia Health System

Hi Vic, We are running into reporting concerns. When I look at projects that are at risk or in trouble the year long projects usually fall in this category because the dates are all over the place. We were thinking of creating a different status specifically for projects that are year long so that we can easily extract them from certain reports-but not sure what issues we may run into with that. Ashley Thomas

Thank you Sharon! We were thinking about a status specifically for ongoing projects, have you run into any reporting issues with this? Do your teams still get notifications for projects that are in an ONGOING status? Ashley Thomas

Hi Ashley, Ah, I see. You can exclude them from your reports as you mentioned and that may suit your needs. The risk of that is it hides a potential problem. Kind of like putting a blanket over a stain in the rug. The stain is still there and needs to be addressed. And the longer it sits without attention, the more likelihood correcting it will take longer and cost more. From a project management perspective what we would do is just work the project as normal. For us, that would mean updating those tasks with dates that are all over the place on a regular basis (I lean towards weekly). Changing those tasks to have more current estimate dates ensures you're staying on top of the projects and they don't get too out of control. I view the project plan as an early warning system and the sooner we hear the warning the easier it is to adjust and fix any issues. If we ignore them until later it becomes more difficult to recover. Just something to consider. Good luck.

Thank you! Ashley Thomas