Putting a project on hold: a review date, or it is a no

"On hold" is the most comfortable status in delivery. Nobody has to say no, nobody has to find the capacity, and the request keeps a place in the list. That comfort is the problem. A hold with nothing attached is a slow maybe: the requester hears "later", plans around it, and finds out months afterwards that later was never scheduled.

There is an honest version of putting work on hold, and it costs one extra sentence.

What "on hold" usually hides

Three different decisions get the same label.

• Not now. The work is worth doing and something else is ahead of it. This is the real hold.
• Not until something happens. A contract is signed, a dependency ships, a question gets answered. That is waiting on a condition, and it should name the condition.
• No. Nobody intends to do it and nobody wants to say so. This is the one that does the damage, because it reads the same as the first two.

The test that separates them is a single question: on what date will someone look at this again? If there is an answer, it is on hold. If the honest answer is "there isn't one", it is a decline that has not been sent.

The rule: a review date, or say it is indefinite

A hold needs exactly one of two things.

• A review date. A day in the future on which the decision is made again. Not "next quarter": a date, with a person who will make the call on it.
• An explicit indefinite hold, with the reason. "We are not going to look at this again unless X changes." It is closer to a decline than to a hold, and saying so in writing is what keeps it from pretending otherwise.

Not both, and not neither. A hold with no date and no stated reason is the status this essay is about getting rid of.

What to write down when you park something

• The reason, in a sentence the requester would accept as fair: what is ahead of it, or what it is waiting on.
• The review date.
• Who decides on that date. A person, because a review owned by a team happens when someone remembers.
• What would change the answer. A named customer, a freed team, a cost crossing a line. This is the part the requester can act on.

Then tell the requester the same four things. The wording for that message is the second of the scripts for declining a request.

On the review date, three outcomes

The review is a decision, not a status check. It ends one of three ways: the work goes into planning, it is parked again with a new date and a reason for the second delay, or it is declined. "Still on hold" with nothing else written is not one of the three.

Count the re-parks. Parked once is prioritisation. Parked three times is a no that three meetings have each declined to say, and by then the kind thing is to decline it with the reason on the record. A long list of items parked many times over is the same problem at scale, and the way out is closing the backlog deliberately.

On hold, waiting, and stopped are different things

A hold applies to work nobody has promised yet. Two neighbours get confused with it.

• Waiting on information is a request that cannot be decided because a question is unanswered. The clock belongs to the person who was asked, and it is a state with an owner, not a parking place.
• Stopping committed work is a different act entirely. Once a date and an outcome have been promised, "on hold" is a broken promise with a soft name. It needs a recorded stop: what was delivered, what was not, and why.

If you use DeliverySheet

Parking is one of the four exits at Decide. The product will not record a park with nothing attached: it takes a review date, which cannot be in the past, or the option to park indefinitely, which requires a reason. Declining requires a reason too. Parked demands sit under their own Parked heading, apart from work in planning, so the list of things on hold is always visible as a list.

When a review date arrives without a decision, the demand appears on the Overview as an overdue decision, with its owner and the date it was due. From there it can go back to a decision, or its review date can be changed. What the product does not do is count how many times something has been re-parked, or send anyone a reminder. Noticing the third park is still yours.