How to Create Custom Workflow in Project Management App Orangescrum

A workflow consists of a sequence of actions needed to complete a task or a project. A workflow reflects the working culture of your team or organization or a set process you need to follow for certain activities and projects.

Workflow management is all about the setup, performance, and monitoring of a defined sequence of processes and tasks, with the broad goals of increasing productivity, reducing costs, becoming more agile, and improving information exchange within an organization.

There is no certain rule to create a workflow. One must consider stakeholder inputs, the objective and current processes to define a robust workflow. Always try to keep your workflow simple and effective.

Here are few common workflows used by Organizations

• Web Development Workflow
• Product Development Workflow
• Lead Generation Workflow
• Content Management Workflow
• Marketing Workflow
• Training Workflow
• Applicant Tracking Workflow
• Bug Tracking Workflow

Is it necessary to have a workflow?

As I said, it is not mandatory to have a workflow, but it is good to have standard workflows across your Organization for specific activities. And almost all organizations have their own pre-defined procedures. A well –defined workflow gives clear information about the status of a task or project & real time indication of who’s responsible for the task and keeps everyone on the same page.

In Orangescrum, you can create your own custom workflow as per your own project requirements. You can have flow for each project individually or have one common flow across projects.

How to create a custom workflow in Orangescrum?

To create custom workflow in Orangescrum;

• Login to Orangescrum
• Navigate to left menu panel and click on Add-ons
• Click on Workflow Mgmt.

• On the Task Status Group page, click on “+Create New Task Status Group”

• Provide a name for the Workflow

• By default, you have 4 task statuses; New, In Progress, Resolved, Closed
• In order to change or add new task statuses, click on New to change the task status name or click on “Add Status” button at the bottom of the page to add a new task status

• You can define Task Statuses in a logical sequence so as to depict the life cycle of your tasks. You can have unlimited task statuses in a Task Status Group.
• Every Task Status has a unique color to distinguish from each other. You can define a particular color as well by clicking on the “Color Bar”. Once you clicked on it, you’ll see the color picker to select the color or provide the color code to do so. Click on the button as shown to Save.
• Each Task Status has also a percentage bar (%). It shows the progress of a task in terms percentage and weight age it carries.

• Now add or change the status with color and weight age percentage from the first status to last and click anywhere on the page to save it
• Once you follow the above steps, your workflow is ready to use
• Here is one example of a complete workflow

How to add a custom workflow to a project?

A workflow is added to the project at the time of project creation. You will not be able to add a workflow to a project if you have already created tasks for that project as the Default Task Statuses kick in.

You can add it while creating a new project or by editing the existing project which has no task.

• Click on Create Project either from + icon, New Button from the left menu panel or +New
• Refer to the “Task Status Group/Workflow” drop down field on the Create Project Form and select the relevant Task Status Group you had defined earlier.

 

• To add the workflow to an existing project with no task(s), navigate to Project page and click on drop down arrow in list view or three dot icon on the card view
• Click on Edit from the options
• On the Edit pop-up, add the workflow you want to use

How to use the custom workflow?

• Create a Task
• The new task will be created with first task status e.g. New
• Click on the task, on the task detail page, put your comments, attach files and then change the Status to any of the Status available

• Once you update the status, it will automatically update the task percentage bar as defined the Task Status Group/Workflow

 

Note: This custom workflow is only available for our Community (Open Source) users. You can get this add-on from here.

How to create a workflow for Projects?

Now you can create different statuses for a project too in Orangescrum.

To create workflow/status for projects,

• Navigate to create project
• On the create project pop-up, scroll down to bottom you can see the option to “add” new statuses for project or select “Statuses” from the drop down list if any

• To use the Status, on the project page, edit a project and update the Status.
• On the List view of the project, you can see the status of the Projects.

Note: This feature is only available in Executive Dashboard add-on. To know more, click here.

Benefits of  Workflow in Project Management

• Standardized Workflow across teams
• No ambiguity in task planning and execution
• Increased accountability and coordination among teams
• Quick Status History of the task life cycle to handle delays or errors in task resolution
• Transparent reports
• Better communication between departments

Over to you

How about realizing the above benefits for yourselves? Explore our Task Status Group and Executive Dashboard add-on.

How do you manage your project workflows and which is the most common workflow in your Organization? Do let us know in comments!

I will be back with another blog on How to maximize the benefits of Orangescrum. See you soon!