Whole-organization custom fields are hard to manage

Custom fields are great. But we are a big organization with a lot of departments that don’t know each other, and we’ve now stepped on each other’s toes a lot without meaning to. We find it quite surprising to edit the custom fields in one project and suddenly get a phone call from someone we’ve never met, asking why we messed up their completely unrelated project.

Luckily, the UI does give you enough clues to figure it out: there is a warning that fields are shared across all projects, and there is also a change history for each custom field, so we can actually figure out who to get in touch with. That’s great!

But really, what I want is custom fields that I know only affect a single project.

I’ve seen this posted in Tips & Tricks, but not yet in Product Feedback.

Agreed! I just added a very similar Product Feedback before seeing this post.

@Alexis, is there presently a way to merge similar Product Feedback items?

I completely agree with this!

We have a large organization as well and each team uses common custom fields like “Department” and “Status” but they use them differently so the options are becoming quite cluttered.

Ie, our Events Department has “Department” field that only includes the departments that support our events, “Box Office, Events, Ops, Security, Marketing, Comms, F&B, Finance, etc”
our Marketing Department has their own “Department” field that encompasses all departments they are doing work for, “Arts & Culture, Aquatics, F&B, Golf, Guest Services, HR, Events, Sport & Rec, etc…”

So when different teams are selecting custom fields in their projects it becomes quite confusing and as noted above some teams are accidentally changing things in each others fields. Make sense?

Having the option to create custom fields available to the organization, team, or one-off for project would be very helpful :slight_smile:

Yes! I created a CRM project so it can connect to different event projects, where those clients are vending. However the custom fields that help me in so many ways, follow the CRM entry from event to event… its gotten messy at this point and I’m going to have to rebuild the way we use projects connected to the CRM project.
Easy fix would be a setting to choose whether or not a custom field is ‘sticky’ to the original entry or specific to the project it is added to.