How Board View can change the way you work

At Teamwork, we’re all about giving you the flexibility you need to work your way.

That means that no matter how you want to manage your work or which project management methodology you like to use, Teamwork can help.

For some projects, the best way of getting things done is with a humble task list. Using a task list is a quick and easy way to list out everything you and your team need to do to hit your goals, and enjoy the satisfaction of watching your list shrink as you start ticking items off.

 But for other projects, you might prefer to take a different approach: something that lets you visualize your process and gives you immediate, at-a-glance updates on your work’s progress.

 For those times, you need Board View. Here’s why it’s so helpful — and how your team can use it.

(Not sure whether to use Task Lists or Board View? Check out our complete guide to managing your work in Teamwork!)

What is Board View?

Board View lets you map out your process into columns, see all of your tasks represented as cards, and quickly and easily see what stage each piece of work is at.

 Using boards to visually represent your work is a key part of many popular project management methodologies.

 They’re especially important in agile methodologies: Kanban boards, Scrum, Scrumban, and Lean all rely on visual workflows to map out project processes, give you immediate status updates, and reveal bottlenecks, so you can continuously improve your workflow and maximize your team’s efficiency.

 While many approaches use columns to represent the stages of a process (with your task moving across the board from left to right as it progresses), there are lots of other ways to use Board View to represent your work.

 For example, you can also use columns in Board View as a way to group your work together into categories, if you prefer.

And of course, everything in Board View is supported by the robust tagging and filtering options you’ve come to expect from Teamwork, so you can curate your work even further.

 Still not convinced? Here are a few more reasons to try Board View.

What are the benefits of Board View?

1. Get immediate visual status updates on each task’s progress

One of the most helpful things about Board View is how visual it is. This means that it’s easy and instant to see how your project is progressing, and get at-a-glance status updates of various tasks change as they move from column to column.

 Board View lets you see who’s working on what, how each task is progressing, and make things even clearer with customizable tags. Not only that, but it helps each team member to see how they fit in to the project’s ecosystem — and how the work they do contributes to the big picture.

2. Reveal the logistics of your project — and improve it

Is your process running the way you want it to? Or is your team just doing things the way they’ve always been done?

 Mapping out your process using Board View forces you to get crystal clear about your workflow — as it actually is, not as you wish it would be. It helps you to pinpoint what’s working for you, where the pitfalls are, and what can be improved.

 For many people, the process of mapping out their process can be a big “aha!” moment, helping them to discover optimization possibilities they didn’t even know they needed.

3. Automate your processes with Triggers

Triggers in Board View are an effortless way to keep your project running smoothly. They allow you to set it so that once a card is moved to a certain column, an action of your choice is automatically performed.

 With Triggers, you can reclaim time previously lost to manual admin work, make your workflow more efficient, and ensure consistency and best practices every time.

 There are tons of ways to use Triggers to make your workflow more efficient. For example, you can set a trigger to:

• Reassign a task to a different team member

• Change the due date

• Create subtasks (from a manual list or an existing task list template)

• Send custom notifications

• Automatically archive a task once it’s moved to the final column

4. Spot common roadblocks

Once you have your ideal process mapped out, it becomes even easier to spot any potential roadblocks or bottlenecks — before they become major issues.

 If you notice that tasks seem to repeatedly get stuck in one column, you know that that’s an area you need to look at. For example, maybe you find that tasks get stuck in the “Client approval” column, causing a knock-on effect on the rest of your team’s work. With Board View, it’s easy to spot when a build-up of cards becomes a bottleneck, allowing you to pinpoint precisely what actions you need to take to get things on track.

 This is especially useful when you’re planning your team’s work and trying to juggle multiple deadlines. By identifying bottlenecks in advance, you can better prepare by moving other work around, reallocating your resources, or taking other preventative measures to avoid derailing your hard work.

How can my team use Board View?

The great thing about Board View is that it’s super flexible and easy to customize, so you can tailor it to your own workflow and make it your own with tags and Triggers.

But if you’re looking for a few use cases for inspiration, here are some examples your team can use:

Boards for content creation

Whether you’re writing blog posts, recording podcasts, or editing videos, boards are a great way to map your content creation process. Here’s how we do it.

Boards for client work

Give your stakeholders the ability to get status updates as and when they want. With your clients added as free collaborators, they can quickly see what stage a piece of work is at, without needing to chase up a member of your team. You can also set a trigger to notify them once work reaches a certain stage, or reassign the task to the client to review or for approval.

Boards for development and testing

Boards are a natural fit with many agile management tools and development methodologies and practices. Run your sprint in Teamwork by selecting tasks from the Backlog, then moving them through your development, testing, and deployment processes.

Boards for recruiting and onboarding

Growing your team? Using Board View helps you to track each candidate as they move through the hiring, interviewing, and onboarding processes, helping you to create a more positive, transparent candidate experience. Learn how we use it.

Boards for organizing your cards

Of course, you can also use Board View as a simple visual way of sorting your tasks, rather than as a representation of a process flow. Using it this way, you can group similar cards together in columns. For example, you might have columns for each month of the quarter with the work needed for each month, or you might use it to organize tasks by department or building.

Boards for basic Kanban methodologies

Not sure where to start with your board? Begin with the basics. All you need to get started with a basic Kanban board is three columns: To Do, Doing, and Done. It’s a quick and simple way to start tracking your work in Board View. Once you see how easy and helpful it it to manage your work like that, you can dress it up with extra columns, tags, and triggers.

Filtering your board

Once your board is up and running, you can create and share filters to make it even more precise and useful.

Filters are handy for zeroing in on only the work that meets one or more criteria. For example, you can filter your board to show only the tasks that are assigned to you, or just cards that are tagged with “Blog post” (or a combination of criteria).

 You could also use filters to create more specific views that you can share with client’s or stakeholders (for example, you can choose to hide any subtasks and only show the parent tasks, to give clients a more streamlined view).

 Once you’ve created your filters, simply save them and share them. For more about working with filters in Board View, see this help doc.

How do you use Board View?

We’d love to know how you use boards to make your workflow smoother and more efficient. Let us know how you like to use them in the comments!