Waiting and On Hold

[Jeremiah]

I'm building a templated workflow to reuse across multiple projects and maybe I've been at it too long, but it was clear to me that a status of Waiting or On Hold was an In Progress status.

But, now I'm second guessing myself. I can't decide if I should move those to To Do or not. Because, technically, they aren't in progress anymore. 

I'm curious as to what the rest of you think or do.

[ 2 ] To Do
[ 2 ] In Progress

@moderators, this got filed under JSM, any chance it can get moved to just Jira?

[Jeremiah]

I just noticed my post got filed under JSM. That's not what I picked when I originally filled it out. Weird.

[Jeremiah]

Thanks. Either way, I'm not necessarilay talking about JSM and SLAs. But just the overall concept in general for a Business project.

[Jeremiah]

Correct. Which is the whole point of this discussion. I'm not necessarily interested in the SLA (though, something flagged this conversation to be that); more of a matter of interest in how others view these types of statuses. :)

[David Friedrich]

That is purely a matter of opinion. It depends on how the process is defined and what you want to measure. Example: Time to close SLA. Here the ticket is waiting for feedback from the customer in the status Resolved (Caterogry = Done). The category of the status therefore does not define how the SLA behaves. The defined process does.

[Jeremiah]

True. But you wouldn’t pause if it were in progress, right? You’d want to make sure the status was in a to do category. 

[David Friedrich]

You can pause SLA in any status. This is not depending on the status category.

[Susan Waldrip]

OK, now your previous response makes more sense to me! ☺️

Hope you get a lot of good responses!

[Susan Waldrip]

I think it depends -- you can assign them the To Do category, or you can assign them the In Progress category and add conditions in your SLAs that pause the clock when certain things happen (like when Status transitions to Waiting or On Hold) -- check out this page for info on this: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-sla-conditions/ .

I also updated the link in my previous response to add the page for the Cloud version (the one I originally entered was for the Data Center version).

[Jeremiah]

Thanks for that. I am using SLA's in my JSM projects and hadn't considered how that relates to JWM projects and their statues. So, maybe that's why I'm leaning to On Hold and Waiting as To Do category statues?

[Susan Waldrip]

Hi @Jeremiah , if you use or plan to use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in JSM, you might want to review the basic online SLA info -- if something is On Hold or Waiting for something, you may not want that time counted in your "work" time for the issue.

Try https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicemanagementserver0511/service-level-agreements-slas-overview-1319568427.html (Data Center) or https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/create-service-level-agreements-slas/ (Cloud) to start, hope this helps!

[Jeremiah]

Anyone else feel like chiming in?

[Jeremiah]

Thanks for the input. Maybe I'm thinking too literally... I guess if you're not actively working on the issue, it can't possibly be In Progress. It's now a To Do.

I'm curious what others think too!

[David Friedrich]

I agree, a pending status should be part of the "In Progress" status category.

No matter how you call it (Waiting, On Hold, Pending), your issue is actively being worked on. Just that something has come up and now you are waiting on a third party, a change or a delivery to happen before it can move on in your workflow.

In this sense, waiting is an activity that is part of the completion process.

[Jeremiah]

Thank you. So, that's one vote for In Progress.

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

@Jeremiah 

Each status in Jira need to part of To Do, In Progress and Done category.

Usually "On Hold" or "Waiting" statuses are part of In Progress category. To be honest it doesn't really matter unless it is a Done category. Issue will go to On Hold or Waiting after some activity so I would keep using the In Progress category.

Ravi