How to benefit from Custom Status Workflows in Orangescrum

Status Workflows are important for projects. We understand that businesses have various functions & distinct projects thereof with their own workflows.

Also, project management software are at the center of end to end project planning, collaboration & execution.How well defined is your project flow today?

Custom Status workflows are instrumental in ensuring your processes are followed and gaps if any are sealed!

And the primary objective – “Greater adherence to processes & prevent missteps in execution.”

Different departments have their own use cases ad would like to have the freedom to define workflows that suit them best. And this is an aspect that all good online project collaboration tools must meet.

In this blog we will focus on:

• Understanding the concept of status workflows for our projects
• Getting the maximum benefits from workflows

Along with workflows, project templates too add to precision in project execution.

In Orangescrum, we have created some predefined project templates that link to their respective status workflows and corresponding views for task management and collaboration.

Currently, there are 8 per-defined project templates in Orangescrum as shown below.

And each of these project templates have a dedicated workflow linked.

So how do they work?

You can choose the relevant project template on the “Create Project” form and the corresponding status workflow is automatically linked.

Case in point, I created a “QA Efforts Project” using the Bug Tracking project template as follows:

And the status per-defined in the Bug Tracking workflow are

Note: – You can add more new status to this existing workflow and also edit the names, colors and progress % for each of these statuses per your project requirements.

So the resultant view of a bug tracking project is a Board View as shown below.

Custom Status Workflow’s salient features and benefits overview

Features

• Define a set of individual task status that are relevant to the project and meaningful for your teams.
• One status workflow can have unlimited status.
• You can color code each status and also assign a progress or completion% as shown in the image above.
• A project can have only one status workflow.
• You can reuse the same workflow for multiple projects.
• You can create as many workflows as you like.
• Easy drag and drop tasks among statuses for quick task progress update.

Benefits that Status Workflows add to your project collaboration are:

• A single view to track the task execution progress.
• Transparency in task assignment
• Easy for team members to collaborate.
• Meaningful status buckets present a very clear picture of how things are progressing for the project team.
• Every business function within your company can create their own workflows.
• Daily checkpoint and status update meetings are quick and efficient.
• Board view acts like a self-service portal for team members to pick-up tasks from respective queues.

I want to setup a status workflow of my own. How?

1. Click on Status Workflow from the left main menu.

2. Click on “Create New Status Workflow” on the resultant workflow page

3. Name your workflow and provide a meaningful description. Click on “Add”

4. Your desired workflow is created and you can see that in the workflow list view.

5. Click on the newly created workflow to update it with your own set of task status.Click on
6. Create New Status to keep on adding as many status as you need for this workflow.

• • Here, you can name a meaningful status.
  • Indicate the task progress when it is in this status.
  • Provide a color scheme to each status as shown below.
    

7. You will see the new status in the status listing page of the Customer Support Workflow.

8. Continue to add as many statuses as per step 6.

9. When you are ready click on “Create Project” to apply this workflow to a relevant project.

10. And once your project is created you are directed to the Kanban view as below.

Get going by adding tasks to your project, assign them to the team members and track progress effortlessly.

For a detailed overview and workflow setup information refer our help desk.

Key Takeaways

Maintaining a set of relevant workflows is crucial to an engaging project management practice.

Unless the processes are well-defined and tracked there will be confusion and chaos.

Thus your teams will spend a lot of effort and time in getting to the crux of things rather than executing in a timely manner.

Moreover, quality and process adherence are affected which isn’t good for the business.

The whole point of having workflows is to prevent people from making their own processes or going off-track with whatever is convenient to them.

Project Managers and Team Leads can collaborate at the beginning of the project and setup a status workflow that is comprehensive and works well for the entire project team.

Streamline and set the path to make it easier for the teams to stay focused on the project goal and minimize distractions.

Once defined, they should activate the project and enable closed loop collaboration and execution within the team.

How well defined is your project flow today?

Are your teams clear of the task acknowledge and release points?

Are you able to identify delay points of tasks?

If you answered NO, you know what you should do next Define your Workflow Now!