Pausing a project (issue) for reporting reasons

[Simon Sahli]

Hello everyone,

there is a new requirement for a Jira JSM project for which I would like to get the input of this community for implementation ideas and best practice.

Context, we are using JSM to manage projects, meaning we are having a project issue type, which has a lot of different subtask, which divide the project into smaller pieces that can be assigned to users that execute the actual task.
We already having a "Start Date", and "Due Date" and and "End Date" field to track the different dates of the project . Due Date is when the project was originally planned to be done and the end date is when it actually happened.

Now the stakeholders want even more date fields for when a project has been stopped and when it will be (or is) restarted. So basically this would show the phase when a project has been stopped.
I am not really happy to add even more date fields and I also see some issues like when there are multiple pauses for one project. 
I am basically wondering what is best practice to be able to track the date / time range of paused issues within Jira for filters and reports?

For the workflow I would add a "On Hold" status that we are already using in other projects when issues are paused.

So yeah, if you have had a similar situation or any best practice tip for the described situation then this would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Simon

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Simon,

We do something similar by creating a custom Paragraph field (multi-line text) and then update it whenever we put something on hold or flag it for some reason. We don't use different date fields for it. Then we add an automation rule to populate it. Here is an example:

[Simon Sahli]

Hi @John Funk

thanks for your response and very interesting approach.

So if I understand correctly, it is possible that whenever someone transfers the status to "On Hold" that the current system date gets written in multi-line text field, correct?

[John Funk]

Correct.

Here's an example of the result: