Adding another choice for STATUS on Project task form

[PaulaaO]

Hi Community,

I have the following requirement from my portfolio stakeholders: add another choice in the status field from Project Task form called Complete and to appear against Blue colour when reviewed on Planning Console (Classic or New Project Workspace) or in the Project Task list of records.

I wanted to ask first whether this is something we should customise at all or leave alone.

If we can proceed and customise this, what is the best approach and what are the relevant components that need updating/creating for this to work, without impacting the current behaviour of the field, given that as per the documentation "it updates automatically based on the difference of the planned end date of the task from the current date".?

The status would change to this new choice whenever the State would become one of the Closed values (Closed Complete, Closed Incomplete, Closed Skipped).

I assume I will need to create a Business Rule for this as well, however my main concern is how to address this whilst maintaining most of the current behaviour of this field.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thank you.

Paula

[PaulaaO · Accepted solution]

Wanted to add this in case someone might have similar requirement - in the end I have reached out to one of our contacts from ServiceNow who is also a Principal Product Success Architect for this area and they advised against this change we wanted to do.

Few of the arguments they provided are:

• the status and state have different meaning and no relation. For example, the project task is complete but the status is Red (based on the latest situation of the task) indicating that the project task was completed with challenges. This information is important for project managers, reporting and learning from previous projects (and project tasks) to avoid the same Risks/Issues or apply similar actions to mitigate/resolve (if using RIDAC to manage Risks, Issues and Actions).
• you would need to apply changes/customizations in many places, here are some examples:
  • Create a new choice at the Project task table
  • A business rule to update the status field when the project task is complete. What happens if the project task is re-opened?
  • Update Field formatting for lists
• there is no guarantee that you won’t impact SPM upgrades
• there are other areas I’m not sure you will be able to change, for example: colour coding from New Project Workspace