Setting an entire Project Sheet to On Hold

dhall

Hi all,

I'm sure someone has encountered this but I'm curious if anyone has done anything with setting an entire project "On Hold" so that it reflects in the rollup sheets/dashboards. For reference, we are using the PMO template to base our projects off of.

What we would like to be able to do is put a new row in at the point of when the project was determined to go "On-Hold" and have it change all the "Not Started", "Upcoming", and "In Progress" statuses to "On-Hold". On the row, the user would put the "Start Date" as the date the project went on hold, but leave the "End Date" blank as it would be unknown. Or possibly, a future date that they think the project will start up again.

I think we can do this relatively easily with automation and a check box but reverting it back I think would be the challenge.

Thoughts? I'd love to hear/see how others tackled this obstacle.

Ray Lindstrom

Hi @dhall,

The problem lies with the available actions for when the Automation is triggered.

Any automation you do will apply only to that row, or to those rows that meet the criteria. You can't specify that if any row's Task Name changes to "Project On-Hold", then update all of the other lines/rows. Automation only updates the rows that match the criteria.

If you did find a workable solution, reverting back would be tough as you mentioned. You would need to use a secondary grid to copy the original lines to before making the changes to "Project On-Hold".

All the best,

-Ray

dhall

Hi @Ray Lindstrom , thanks for the reply!

Yea I have been mulling over this for a while and I can't think of any feasible solution. I'll take it back with my team and see if they have any other ideas. Appreciate the response!

giovenco

Hi @dhall -

Sadly I have experienced this and also not found a solution that works for both being on hold nor coming off hold and ties with the roll up. I suspect this might be because in proper project management it doesn't exist. The definition of a project includes having a start date and end date, therefore a project on hold no longer fits the definition of a project.

I did add a row for the start of hold and "cancelled" all the tasks subsequently. I had to then also update my portfolio dashboard to include a new category: "on hold" and a tie to the intake sheet.

Hope that helps!