Managing your Team's Workload using Boards

An Introduction to Board Views

Boards, sometimes known as Kanban Boards, are a great way to visualize the status of various items simultaneously.

By grouping items into rows and columns, you can quickly track an item through various stages and get a picture of the flow of work.

Boards display records as a card, where the cards can be divided up into columns. Optionally, these columns can then be further divided into rows.

Using Boards to manage Team Workload

Given Boards allow you to see an overall picture of a set of Records, they are a useful tool to help manage the workload for your team.

No matter the industry you work in, or you team size, having visibility of your teammates workload and task list is beneficial. With a Gridfox Board, you can get an at-a-glance view of the progress of all your team activities, identify where there may be workload imbalances, and avoid the need for time-consuming progress update meetings.

This tutorial will cover how to setup a Project for your team’s task list. The Project can easily be configured and adjusted to match your specific team requirements.

To read about other use cases for Boards, take a look through our Board Tutorial list.

Setting up the Tasks Table

To start tracking your team activity in Gridfox, a Tasks Table firstly needs to be created to store all the information about these Tasks.

Creating the Table

1. Open up a Gridfox Project, or create a new one

2. Create a new Table called Tasks

   You can use the View Editor or the Explorer to do this

3. Add the following Fields to the Tasks Table:

   • Text Field called Description
   • User Field called Owner
   • List Field called Status, with Statuses of ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’, ‘Blocked’ and ‘Done’
   • Date Field called Due Date
4. Save your new Table, setting the Task Reference Field as a new Auto Counter

If you take a look at your Tasks Table in the View Editor, it should show as below:

Inviting your Team

To make sure you can assign these Tasks to your team, they will need to be invited to the Project.

1. Click Invite Users in the top navigation bar
2. Enter the email address of a team member, change the Group to ‘Edit’ and click Send
3. Repeat step 2 until all your team members have been invited
4. Optionally, set a color against each user so that they can see where they have been assigned Records at a glance

Your team members will get an email inviting them to the Project. They can start adding in their Tasks and assigning themselves as the Task Owner.

Creating Task Records

Now that the Tasks Table has been setup and your team invited, Tasks can be added into the Project.

1. Exit out of View Editor if required
2. Select Tasks in the navigation bar
3. Create some Task Records

Creating the Task Board

Now that your Table has been setup, you can create the Task Board.

1. Open the Create menu and select Board
2. Enter a View Name - we can call this one ‘Task Board’
3. Click the next arrow

You now have a new Board View. Before it can be saved, it needs to be configured.

Configuring the Task Board

1. In the first step, choose the Tasks Table and click Next
2. Choose to group by the Status Field and click Next

3. Drag the following Fields into the Card Fields section:

   • Description
   • Due Date

   Then click Next

4. Click on Search Fields and drag the following Fields into the Search Fields section:

   • Owner
   • Status
   • Due Date

   Then click Back

5. Open the Card Colours section and select to color code the cards by the Owner Field
6. Open the Row Settings section and select to group by the Owner Field
7. Click Save
8. Click Exit View Editor

Your Board Screen is now all set up and ready for your team to use.

Using the Task Board

Your team can now use the Task Board to manage their workload.

Creating New Tasks

You can use the Task Board to create new Tasks for the team.

1. Click Add New Card in the appropriate row and column for the Task that you would like to create
2. Enter all the required Task information
3. Click Save

The Task will be added to the Board immediately.

Updating Tasks

To update the status of a Task, or to reassign it to another Team member, it can be simply moved around the Board.

Filtering the Task Board

As more and more Tasks get added to the Board, you may want to use the search and filter functionality to tailor the view of Tasks that you see.

As a Project Admin of the Project, you can create filters which can then be saved for your team to use.

Creating a Filter

To help the team focus on what is most important, it may be useful to create a filter which shows all Tasks which are due this week.

1. Click the Filter button
2. In Due Date, select ‘Relative’ and ‘Current Week’
3. Click Save As
4. Call the filter ‘This week’s tasks’
5. Click Save

The filter will now appear in the navigation bar for your team to see.

Summary

You have now created a Task Board for your team to use. They will have easy visibility of everything they are working on, as well as everything that is in flight with the team.

Customize your team’s Project by adding new Fields, creating more Views, building Workflows and adding new Tables.