Feature Update: Pausing Projects & Tasks

In the perfect project management world, work would never get put on hold; clients would never change their mind, key resources would never get pulled away and unforeseen technical challenges would never occur! But the world we live in demands a tool that can adapt to real situations. This improvement makes pausing a project much more effective by ensuring all remaining milestones and tasks are paused, and automatically hides the paused work from your team's schedules.

Pausing Milestones & Tasks

When a project needed to be put on hold, you might have tried deferring some tasks into the future (potentially ruining your beautiful project plan) or un-assigning tasks to clear the schedule time from your team's schedules, but now there's a better way: a brand new Pause status option on your tasks!

Pausing a task will actually ensure auto-scheduled and committed time for that task will be cleared from the assignee's schedule (plus any other users who had time committed to that task). The time remaining on the task won't be removed though - just hidden away until the task is resumed.

Note that when the task is re-activated, the time will need to be returned as auto-scheduled time.

Pausing a milestone is also much more practical now. Everything within it will also pause, unless already completed or inactive. And as you'd expect, when resuming a milestone we'll resume everything belonging to it and restore the previous statuses.

Also, the pausing of a task applies to tasks under Retainer Periods, Sales and Tickets too!

Pausing a Project

To take advantage of this new functionality, your Accelo admin user will need to explicitly configure a new action for your project types. This is deliberate, as we didn't want your team to suddenly find their entire project disappear from schedules when using an existing "Pause" status change on a project.

What you'll need to do is find (or create) a status progression - likely named "Pause" and add a Special Process action to that status progression. There's 2 new ones:

• Pause child milestones and tasks: This will pause all the work within the project which isn't already complete or inactive. Any committed or auto-schedule time for the tasks will become hidden from your users' schedules. Scheduled activities (meetings) will not be changed.
• Resume child milestones and tasks: This will unpause all the work (which isn't already complete or inactive), returning milestones & tasks to their previous status. Estimated time left on tasks will then be returned to users' schedules as auto-scheduled time.

Managing Paused Tasks

Because pausing a task will effectively suppress the time remaining from showing on your schedule, you won't see paused tasks on the Schedule Dashboard or Team Scheduling - unless they have time or scheduled work/meetings booked on them. Of course, they're not completely tucked away like an inactive task. They'll still show in the Tasks tab under a milestone, ticket, sale and so on, and you can filter for them based on the new "paused" task status filter option if they aren't immediately visible.

Lastly, if you spend any time in the Taskboard area of Accelo though, you'll definitely notice an important change here: a new column for your Paused tasks!

Note: This might feel like old news if you were part of the beta-testing period (thanks for testing!) and have already been using this feature for a few months ;-)