What to do when an Idea is finished?
Asked by lprada:

We have an idea that it is finished. The delivery is all done and is in production, what is the best practice, change to archive the state? create a new DONE state?


Answers:
author: Tanguy Crusson
body: Hi [@lprada](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/176390) , there's no best practice per se, it depends on what you use the app, but here's what we do in the Jira Product Discovery team:

* The roadmap field has the values "launched, now, next, later"
* We have a looooot of ideas in the project, most of them have no value for the "roadmap" field because we aren't doing anything about those yet
* When an idea makes the cut, it's assigned a value for the roadmap field. That's how we differentiate the ideas we're actively working on. Our roadmap view excludes the "launched" items and the ideas with no values for the roadmap field
* When we ship something, we set the value of the roadmap field for the idea to "shipped", so that it's filtered from the roadmap view.

![Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 09.14.23.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/223037i9FC68E133EF3C987/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 09.14.23.png")

* We then create a new idea to track improvements for it, and in that idea we collect all the feedback for how we could make it better. We link the 2 ideas (the original one, the feedback one)

![Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 09.16.59.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/223038i5C1B335706D93053/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 09.16.59.png")

* We prioritize improvements in a specific view where we can see everything we shipped, the number of users using these (via Amplitude/Pendo insights), and the number of pieces of feedback as insights

![Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 09.14.51.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/223039i7C9EE0D3EF15C557/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 09.14.51.png")

In our roadmap you'll notice we have different "buckets":

* boulders = brand new things
* improvements = what we just talked about
* platform = making sure the app scales

We make sure to always have things in progress in those 3 buckets.

---

Basically we never archive or delete ideas.

comments: author: Jan-Hendrik Spieth
body: Sooo many interesting details there, [@Tanguy Crusson](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/502312), thanks for sharing!!!

Edit: Do you use the Status field, at all? Because imho your Roadmap field has things that one might typically express as status imho, like "Launched" or "Blocked".


author: Tanguy Crusson
body: We don't, in fact we use 2 fields: Roadmap, and Phase

Phase has the values "Wonder", "Explore", "Make", "Impact", "Scale" which is a little framework we use internally to define the phases of an idea (and that we plan to publish in a bit)

![Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 11.18.54.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/223054i4D1BC76A5942FE3B/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2022-10-28 at 11.18.54.png")


author: Jan-Hendrik Spieth
body: > Phase has the values "Wonder", "Explore", "Make", "Impact", "Scale" which is a little framework we use internally to define the phases of an idea (and that we plan to publish in a bit)

[@Tanguy Crusson](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/502312)still eager to read about that! If you need a peer review, feel free to reach out. I'd be happy to give feedback.


author: Andreas Mouritsen
body: We set all ideas to DONE state and have and automation that archives any ideas in DONE state.

Additionally we sort the archived items by updated state, to always show the latest finished feature to the entire team (if an item is updated in the archive this falls apart though).

However, I do miss being able to search for specific issues that are finished in a certain time frame etc.

As such, this feels more like a workaround.

comments: author: Jack Arndt
body: i'm leaning towards this *workaround* approach  

Regarding search, have you tried querying a custom jql to identify items that have moved to done within a specific window of time?


author: Ivor
body: I archive ideas that are done, not bothering with another state. You can write an automation that does it for you for past month, quarter or year... Depends on you. I have the numbers mainly for reporting purposes only.


author: HilaL
body: Hi [@Tanguy Crusson](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/502312) , can you please share the teams allocation view?


author: Vaishali Patil
body: You could have an automation rule to archive a 'done' status idea after a certain period of time. Setup filters so that done status doesnt show on the views.

This way the completed ideas wont clutter your boards but are still available for search for a period of time.


author: Jan-Hendrik Spieth
body: We have only limited experience with finished ideas, yet.

But I agree setting to Done and then archive lateron (automated or not) makes sense.

My 50 cents: simply put, if you still want to work with the idea in any way, or if you want to keep it for reference or something like that, you would not want to archive it, just yet.

Archived ideas are not visible in views anymore (just in the "Archive" view), and they are also not considered for the calculations of weighted formulas, anymore.

So imho, the question on when, or even if, to archive, hinges on whether you still want to see the idea (done or not) in your lists/boards etc, and whether you still want it to be part of calculations.

Whereas the status field has no such effect out of the box, and you can use it to track/express the status or resolution of an idea, without hiding it from views and formulas.