Lifecycle States
From Clarizen
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[edit] Overview
Clarizen Projects and Work Items have 5 defined States:
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Draft – The planning stage. Scoping out project work, budget and resourcing.
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Active - When your project is ready to start. It is fully scoped, fully resourced and is ready to begin execution, however it may not have reached its targeted start date. Tasks and milestones may have dependencies on predecessor tasks and milestones, so whilst a task may be active it may not yet be executable
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On Hold – if a project or individual work item has stalled for some reason, such as the customer postpones a decision, budget is exhausted, project sponsor drops support.
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Cancelled – the project or individual work item will not be executed.
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Completed – No further work is planned.
By default, when you activate a project, all of the sub projects, milestones and tasks contained within it will be activated.
Clarizen also supports "rolling wave" planning, where one part of a project is being planned while another is being executed.
- example 1: a project where the first milestone is a viability study or sales process that the following milestones are dependent on. In such a case, you can choose to activate the initial milestone without activating the entire project.
- example 2: you may choose to manage the entire project manually by building an approval process that will formally activate each milestone when the predecessor is approved complete.
[edit] State icons in the current project screen (WBS)
[edit] Updating Lifecycle State
Project Manager in Clarizen has full control over all work and related objects in the Projects they manage so they can change the state of the Project or any of the work items contained in its hierarchy.
Work Item Manager (e.g. Manager of a task, milestone or sub-project) can change the state of the individual work items that they are responsible for or of any of the work items contained in its hierarchy (e.g. sub tasks)
Super Users can change any work items in the whole organization so they can change state of any work item in their organization’s Clarizen account.
Resources can change work items from being active to completed by marking them as 100% complete or by reporting enough hours when using Actual & Remaining Effort methodology (system setting 9.3)
Reviewers & Project Sponsors have no ability to update the work plan (WBS).
[edit] Lifecycle State Behaviors
Note: If you re-activate a completed work item, the %Complete and Remaining Effort fields will appear with a "(?)" indicating that Clarizen is now uncertain of the data it has and user input is needed to verify or update these fields
[edit] Changing states via Workflow Rules
If you want to build customizations which modify work items’ states you need to use the dedicated “Change State” action, rather than simply updating the field to the new value.
[edit] Lifecycle States in other parts of Clarizen
[edit] Issues Module: Issues, Risks, Bugs, Requests
Clarizen Issues module lifecycle is more permissive than the Work Items lifecycle as changes between the states do not cause hierarchical recalculations of schedules and budget.
Typically an Issue's lifecycle is as follows:
Since Clarizen 4.9 issues lifecycle is completely open and lifecycle behavior is set by customization workflow and validation rules.
Note that to change Issues' state with customizations you use the "Update Field" action.
[edit] Time & Expense sheets
Time & Expense sheets have 3 states:
- Reported (Unsubmitted)
- Submitted
- Approved
A detailed explanation for Time & Expenses modules can be found for Timesheets and for Expense Reports
Note that to change Timesheets and Expense Sheets states with customizations you use the "Update Field" action.