How to change a Process and a Workflow for my Project with minimal damage?

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Changing the Workflow

Generally, it is safe for you to update your workflows within a process while a project is already using it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind, especially with removing workflow states.

Adding a state to your workflow carries with it no imminent risks.

In the meantime, deleting a state can reset your Assignments and Efforts potentially.

When you delete a workflow state, Targetprocess will prompt you to choose another state that your assignments will shift to. Because of this, when adjusting workflows you should pay close attention to the Roles that are accounted for in your workflow. Any changes to these Roles, especially removing one entirely that had previously been accounted for in your workflow, has the potential to destroy the assignments that were associated with these Roles.

Switching the entire Process

If you need to change the Process related to your Project, you can do that on Project detail page. Click the Process link in the right Info panel. Select the new Process from the dropdown list.

Note:
Switching the Process in the middle of the Project is a potentially unsafe operation! The following details of your entities can be reset:
  1. Current States
  2. Currently selected Custom Field values
  3. Current Assignments
  4. Estimated effort

Moreover, there will be significant slowness or unresponsiveness of your account (up to several hours depending on the Project size).When you mark a non-default process as Default, this action switches Processes for all your Teams so this operation is not safe as well.

Be sure you have a data backup before you switch the Process for your Project. You can Export your items with States and Custom Field values to a .csv files before you perform a Process migration and Import missing data back from this files after some States or Custom Field values have been reset and need to be restored.

As a workaround, you can use the following:

Procedure

  1. Clone the Process your Project is currently using;
  2. Change the Process of the Project to the cloned Process;
  3. Adjust the cloned Process to your needs.