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Ian Bruckner's avatar
Ian Bruckner
Iron Contributor
Mar 22, 2018

Status update comments for projects

How are you handling text-based status updates for your projects in Project Online?

 

Our general requirement is to enter a few lines each week (but this could theoretically be entered more or less often, the time doesn't matter as much as showing the last entry) as a status update and have a dashboard collate that latest entry with other elements like project name, stage, owner, health, hours burn rate, etc.

 

Today my organization is using both a SharePoint list outside of Project Online and Project Online (dual entered), but we're looking to see what's involved with moving to just one PPM solution. In SharePoint alone we're currently just using a text field that PM's add new paragraphs to at the top, and then someone trims all the old status comments when making a report in Excel for the executive team.

 

In the past, we had a SharePoint admin set up linked lists and associated them and it displayed the latest item in the main SharePoint combined-list view, but kept old entries as separate items. That didn't really work out for us and we abandoned it.

 

We don't want to lose the history and when you open up a given project's PDP, it would be useful to see all past entries, so overwriting each week using a single text field would stink. Ideas?

  • Ian Bruckner's avatar
    Ian Bruckner
    Iron Contributor

    Bummer - I would have thought this was a thing others do. Maybe others just rely on metrics alone for dashboards? We're definitely asked here for a snippet of "what's going on".

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