Craft.io has a comprehensive workflow solution to help you and your team members stay organized and deliver on time. In this article, we’ll introduce workflows and give you tips on how to get the most from them.
To view a workflow, simply visit Planning > Manage Features (or one of the Saved View pages) and select ‘Group by Workflow’. Toggle the ‘Assignee’ dropdown to hone in on a specific person or team. In most scenarios, managing workflow is easiest in the ‘Kanban’ view type.
Team Workflow
Craft.io allows you to have a dedicated and customized workflow for each team across your Workspace. For example, your UX team can manage a workflow of ‘Discovery, Wireframe, Prototype and Done’ which will help them track the progress of assigned items via steps most relevant to their process.
By default, each Craft.io team has a workflow of ‘To Do, In Progress and Done’. Each individual step is known as ‘Assignment Status’ in Craft. You can edit these values directly within the workflow view by selecting a specific team under the ‘Assignee’ filter and as per above, grouping by workflow.
Next, click on the heading of a workflow column to edit the name of the assignment status. To insert a new status, hover between two columns and click on the ‘+’ symbol.
To change the order of the workflow steps, in the row below the title of a step hover over the three dots icon and select either ‘→ Move Right’ or ‘← Move Left’. And if required, you can set a limit on the number of items that can sit in a given workflow lane, allowing your team to stay focused on delivering a smaller set of prioritized items.
To review how much work exists for each workflow step, simply click on the statistics icon in any given column and the summary stats will appear.
Setting Assignment Status:
Assignment status helps you and your team to track the status of each individual item. Depending on the view you’ve selected in the Planning > Manage Features screen, you can manage an item’s status in three different ways.
1. Edit the status of an item directly from its properties panel by clicking on the item to open it up. To reassign the item to another team or user, in the Properties menu located on the right-hand side of the screen, click on the current user listed beside the ‘Assignee’ label, then select the new team or team member to assign the item to. To change the status of the item, click on the current status beside the ‘Status’ label, then make your new status selection.
2. From the Planning > Manage Features screen, select ‘View as: Table’. Next, in the ‘Assigned to’ column, click on the user icon in the Feature row you’d like to update, and either change the assignee and/or click again to update the status. You can also drag and drop the item rows between the groups on the page.
Note: If your table view does not feature the ‘Assigned to’ column, you can easily add this by toggling the ‘Columns’ menu and selecting ‘Assigned to’ from the list.
3. In either Kaban or Timeline view: hover over the ‘Assigned To’ user icon of a specific Feature box and click when the pencil appears. Quick edit assignment and status from the menu that appears.
Some final tips and tricks:
The final status in each team’s workflow should correspond to ‘Done’. To give the team further insight into why the item has been marked as ‘Done’, you have the option to set a specific ‘Done Reason’ (such as the standard ‘Completed’, ‘Cannot Complete’, ‘Duplicated’, ‘Discarded’, etc.).
To help you filter and stay on track of items with different workflow statuses, we’ve created a ‘Completion status’ filter. To add this filter to any view in the Planning > Manage Features screen, click on ‘Filters’, then ‘Add Filter’ and select ‘Completion status’. Now you can filter by items that are unassigned, not started, in progress and complete.
Here is a summary of the definition of each completion status:
If an item’s assignment status has been marked as ‘Done’, but a team member needs to reopen it and assign it another value (such as ‘In progress’), they have the choice to specify a ‘Reopened Reason’ to provide further transparency as to why the item was reopened. The ‘Reopened Reason’ can be updated directly in the item’s properties panel.