- Hey, it's Jamin,
and today's TeamGantt tip,
we're gonna look at boards.
Specifically, the difference between project boards
and custom boards.
(upbeat music)
A Gantt chart is a great way
to track your project's big picture
within a linear timeline.
But in some cases,
the order in which the tasks are completed may not be
as important to everyone as being able
to clearly see a backlog of your tasks,
and keep track of where those tasks are
in a specific set of phases that they need to go through
to be completed,
that's where boards come in.
Kanban boards are great at tracking this type of thing.
Let's say for instance,
that your tasks all start in a phase that we'll call To Do.
This is your backlog of things that still need to be done.
When you're ready to start working on a task,
you could move it from To Do into In Progress,
and once it's completed,
you could move it on to Done.
Now that's a really simple representation of how boards work
in TeamGantt,
but here are some of the things that make it more powerful.
You may have noticed that the tasks completion percentage
automatically went up when we moved it through each phase.
That's because you can assign completion percentages
to each column,
so when a task moves to the next phase,
it's automatically updated.
It works the same way if you move it back a phase.
It's easy to add, rearrange,
and collapsed columns too.
You can also add or edit completion percentages
for each column in your board.
The fun doesn't stop there,
because all of this great information ties back
to every other view on your project.
If you make a change in one view,
it updates everywhere.
So if you're a project manager,
or stakeholder that needs to see
how all that work being done
in boards affects your beautiful, big picture timeline,
you can instantly,
or if you're part of a smaller sub team
that really only needs to worry
about managing your part of the work in a Kanban board,
you can do that too.
The best thing is you can take advantage
of the unique benefits of a Gantt chart,
like task dependencies, resource management,
and drag and drop task scheduling
while still being able to incorporate agile workflows.
Okay, so now that we've gone over
what boards are in TeamGantt,
let's talk about the difference between project boards
and custom boards.
Project boards are pretty straightforward.
They're a one-to-one representation of a Gantt chart project
in a Kanban board.
Everything in your Gantt chart is displayed in your board
and everything in your board ties back to your Gantt chart.
It's essentially a different way to view and work
on your project,
and setting them up is easy.
From your project,
click on the Board's tab,
then add your project phases.
They'll show up as columns in your board.
We'll stick with, To Do, In Progress, and Done.
Click Next.
Now, if you'd like add completion percentages
to your board columns.
You don't have to do this
if you don't want your task completion percentages
to automatically update when you move them across the board,
but if you do,
this is where you set this up.
We'll go with zero for To Do.
50% for In Progress,
and 100% for Done.
Click Finish and Create Board,
and that's it.
Now you can move your columns across the board
and see them update.
You can also click Back to Gantt View
to see that everything is updated there as well.
Easy peasy.
The purpose of custom boards is to manage one board of tasks
that comes from multiple projects.
Let's say for instance,
that you work on a QA team that manages QA work on all
of your companies in development projects.
Well, you can create a custom board for that,
just mouse over the side menu,
and click on the Plus icon next to Custom Boards,
then name and create your board.
Next name your columns,
and you've got your custom board.
Before you start searching for tasks to populate your board,
you may want to set some filters.
You can filter by people, labels, projects,
statuses, or colors.
Let's say that your team is working on these three projects.
Now only tasks that are part
of those projects are displayed.
You can still search for a task by name,
or you can scroll and start dragging tasks
from these projects into your board.
Now you can manage your team's work from all three projects
in one board.
If you set up percent complete in your columns,
it will work in custom boards too,
automatically updating completion percentages and sending
that info back to the tasks project as well.
The last big difference between project boards
and custom boards is that project boards
will automatically invite anyone
who's already included in your project.
With custom boards,
you have to invite people manually,
but it's easy.
Just click on the Invite People button,
and then invite them in the same way you would
to your Gantt chart projects.
You can search for the name of anyone in your account,
and if you don't find them,
create a new contact and invite them.
Boards are available on all standard and advanced plans.
To learn more about the ways
that TeamGantt can help you manage your project with boards,
go to teamgantt.com/support.