Timelines as framework are helpful not only for planning, but for tracking as well. In my previous two posts I shared some tips on how to use Timelines in Targetprocess 3 for planning (project portfolio management and roadmapping), and touched upon the tracking aspect just briefly, as I explained how the current and the past cards are shown in the timeline. Today, I’d like to tell more about tracking low-level work items with timelines.
We can set up a timeline to have a look at how the team is doing. The first step would be to select user stories, tasks, bugs and test plan runs as cards, and filter them out so as to display only the ones from the Customize Cards team. The simplest way to do this would be to select just this one team in the Teams-Projects context menu:
Check out how the timeline looks:
As you can see there are no planned cards on the timeline, only the actual work. This is because user stories, tasks, bugs and test plan runs haven’t been planned using the timeline. As a side note, it would be obviously a bad practice to plan such low-level work items on the timeline, but the tool’s limitations shouldn’t be an obstacle, that’s why Targetprocess 3 allows that. It's up to you whether to do the planning in the timeline, or not. Just remember, that if you’ve done any planning with the timeline, the planned cards, not only the actual work, will appear there. Otherwise, all the work that is not planned and not started is shown in the backlog.
If a work item is in progress, and there is some progress indeed, e.g. time spent reported, or some tasks done for a user story, then a forecast can be calculated. The forecast is shown as a transparent section on the card.
If you need more details and want to have a look at what the Customize Cards team members do, select “Persons” as swimlanes first. All the people from all the projects selected in the Teams-Projects context menu will appear as swimlanes, so as a next step we need to use the following advanced filter:
"?TeamMembers.Where(Team.Name is 'customize cards')".
That’s what we’ll see then:
If you want to check how things are going for all the projects, you can select “Projects” as swimlanes:
If you want to see only a few projects, you can filter them by names, e.g. "iOs,TP3" or focus them:
Check out some other useful configurations:
