As the final feature of Polish Week, we’ve added commenting to project status updates.
Project status updates help you communicate the state of a project. They let you set a color (Green: on track, Yellow: at risk, or Red: off track ) and post a summary of your progress to project members. But until now, you couldn’t comment on a project status update. Now you can! Project members can reply to updates with questions and feedback, or they can create a task directly from a comment.
As a project owner, it’s important to keep your project team and other stakeholders up to date on your progress. Status updates let you share the current state of the project with all project members. Status colors signal how things are going and whether the project needs attention.
Project owners can set up reminders to update their project status every week (they’ll get a task to prompt them).
Status updates are useful for communicating milestones being hit, roadblocks, changes in timeline, or ongoing progress reports. They can even help you cut down on those dreaded weekly check-in meetings. They’re great for all project members, especially those who only want the highest-level view and aren’t following every task.
Now that we’ve added commenting on status updates, when a teammate wants to follow up on a status update, they can comment, ask a question, or even create a new task right from the conversation.
We suggest that project owners update their project status weekly. To post a project status update:
Navigate to the Progress View of any project.
Select a status color—green, yellow, or red.
Describe any noteworthy events, milestones, or roadblocks that happened since your last update. You can even link to relevant tasks, projects, conversations, or teammates.
Project members who are following status updates will get a notification in their Inbox and can comment on the status, just like with Project Conversations.
Status updates will appear in Progress View (as they always have) and now they will appear in the Conversations View too.
You might be thinking, “If project status updates are more like conversations now, then when should I use a status update versus a project conversation?” It isn’t an exact science, but we do have some guidelines that we’ve found helpful.
Update your project status:
Weekly, to give an overview of recently completed work and what’s up next
When major milestones are hit
When roadblocks come up or things go off track
When plans or timelines change
Start a Project Conversation:
To check in on how your team is feeling about the project
To brainstorm ideas that cross multiple tasks
To ask general questions about the project or solicit feedback
We hope you enjoy the latest (and final!) feature from Polish Week. Status updates are a powerful tool to give teammates and stakeholders a snapshot of progress and blockers. Now, your teammates are empowered to respond with questions, or just congratulate you on the great progress :)
In case you missed them, read about all the other the features from this latest Polish Week:
What’s your favorite new feature from Polish Week?