Automatically change project status based on project plan activity

[vic-georgiev]

Right now we introduce multiple levels of status changes that are all manual. This increases the project managers work and we can do some simple automations in order to prevent errors.

• Switching phase status to Planned
  It makes sense to switch the project status to "in review" when we have a project stage that is planned - the customer can now see and contact the project managers and discuss details.

• Starting work on a project phase
  This should automatically update the project to "Active" state as we have work under way.

@rmjmccormick @acshields please feel free to chime in.

Aha! Link: https://topcoder.aha.io/features/TCCONNECT-259

[rmjmccormick]

@vic-topcoder just to confirm you are referring to the project-level statuses on the left sidebar? As in, in both your example cases, when a given phase is planned or in progress, this should automatically trigger a change to the project-level status as appropriate?
If so, I wholeheartedly agree.
I'd also add one final use case - when all project phases are marked as "delivered", and there are no remaining draft or planned phases, the project-level status should flip to completed.

[vikasrohit]

It makes sense to switch the project status to "in review" when we have a project stage that is planned - the customer can now see and contact the project managers and discuss details.

I think we should mark the project as reviewed instead of in_review because in_review is the status which is set when customer clicks on Submit for Review button and we use this status to post a message to the slack channel where our managers can look for new projects. However, if we set project's status to reviewed it would post message to the copilots channel in the slack which would tempt copilots to claim the project which technically would work fine but as now we have multiple phases per project, we might have to think about a new flow around copilots claiming phases instead of projects.

I'd also add one final use case - when all project phases are marked as "delivered", and there are no remaining draft or planned phases, the project-level status should flip to completed.

I think it would cause some issue for long running projects where there might be a case where all phases are marked as complete. Now if the customer or manager want to have more work included in the project, they would add the phase later but if we mark the project as completed they won't be able to mark the project active again.

[rmjmccormick]

I think it would cause some issue for long running projects where there might be a case where all phases are marked as complete. Now if the customer or manager want to have more work included in the project, they would add the phase later but if we mark the project as completed they won't be able to mark the project active again.>

@vikasrohit Good point, as we saw last week through that email exchange with Joey Poarch! Though, we should be urging managers to close out projects and starting an entirely new project where the delay between the original project closing and the new "additional" piece of work exceeds 3 months. Keeping projects open has implications for revenue recognition (we can only recognise fully on project closure).

[vikasrohit]

I don't think we have time to close this out before Aug 09. Targeting it for next release.

[maxceem]

As I understood from the discussion only two cases from the first comment has to be implemented #2275 (comment)

Done via fa31fe0

Note, to avoid any unwanted affects during:

• Switching phase status to Planned
  I only switch projects to reviewed state if it was previously in draft or in_review state
• Starting work on a project phase
  I only switch projects to active state if it was previously in draft, in_review or reviewed state

[vikasrohit]

Note, to avoid any unwanted affects during

Perfect.

I only switch projects to reviewed state if it was previously in draft or in_review state

Lets keep the project in in_review state as originally suggested by @vic-topcoder until we get confirmation about changing it to reviewed.