Epicflow Updates: Advanced Task and Load Management with a Task List's Group Tab

Our mission is to simplify multi-project resource management, help project teams be maximum efficient, and let companies grow by intaking more orders and delivering their initiatives faster and cheaper. Task and workload analysis is an essential element of efficient resource management in a multi-project environment, which is why we’ve enhanced some of our Task List features. Read further to learn what opportunities you will have now when working with a Task List in Epicflow.

Explore Your Resources’ Workload at Different Levels in the Task List

Let us briefly remind you of the Task List functionality first. There used to be three tabs in it: Personal Task List, Meeting View, and Task List. In all these tabs, you can examine the statuses of tasks (not ready to start, upcoming, ready to start, on hold, in progress), their names, projects they belong to, their assignees, their priority coefficient, and time-related data (total, spent, and remaining hours).

Personal Task List

Here single users can review their own and other team members’ tasks divided into categories.

Meeting View

A convenient tool for task analysis during meetings and standups with a customized list of users.

Task List

A general list of the project team’s tasks ordered by priority. Upon entering Task List page, users find themselves in this tab by default.

Allowing for the size of companies, the main tab of the Task List, where all projects’ tasks are presented, can be overwhelmed by the number of users and tasks to be shown (their numbers can reach dozens of thousands at large corporations). This can cause the increase of the load time, and moreover, workload analysis at different levels (rather than just individual and project team) is more informative. This is why we’ve created a Group tab for Task List.

In the Group tab, you can select any group or multiple groups from any project team as well as see all resources in the chosen group(s) to see their individual tasks and explore all the related information. The Group tab provides a comprehensive view of all task-related information from micro to macro levels. Once set up in the requested way, it can be stored for further use in the future. Let’s now take a look at its modes.

Task List’s Group Tab Modes

Category View

This category view is similar to the Personal Task List tab with the tasks divided by categories according to their statuses (not ready to start, upcoming, ready to start, on hold, in progress).
In this view, only the top 5 tasks with the highest priority are shown by default, but you can load more tasks.

User View

In this view, you can check all tasks assigned to a resource (or resources) that you selected.
The tasks are ordered by priority, and only 5 highest-priority tasks are shown by default. The list can be expanded if necessary.

Plain View

You can select a resource group of individual resources to analyze their task-related data.
Upon the selection, you get an overview of all tasks that are planned for the selected resources.
In this view, tasks are ordered according to the priority.

You can use filters for easier search and analysis. Tip: Apply tags to define a team that works on the same project but consists of the users from different groups. For instance, you can create a tag “Production team” to gather users from Construction, Assembly, Welding, and other groups and then filter users by this tag to analyze their workload. Then you can enable a user view to show the load of every user in this team.

Exploring Extra Information: Task Execution Timelines and Resource Load

In any mode of the Group tab, you can see additional information about the period of task accomplishment and the workload the tasks put on resources. Take a look at them in a slider below (use the dots below to switch the slider and see all views of the Group tab).

Check time frames of your resources' / groups’ tasks in a Timeline View

By opening this view, you can see the periods when the tasks should be done. A bar in front of each task shows the time frames, starting with the earliest day (today) when the assignment can be initiated and finishing with the dashed area to show the whole period allotted for the task (ending with the latest finish date possible). You can zoom in and zoom out the time frame to see the task execution periods at different levels (days, weeks, months, quarters, years).

Examine all task-related information from a single place in a Full Timeline View

In this view, you can check all the task-related information: hours, assignees, names, projects together with the time bars from the previous menu. You can change the width of the timeline view to hide or extend additional data.

Explore all task-related information together with workload in a Full Timeline + Future Load Graph View

In this view, you can enable a Future Load graph to examine the load coming from the selected tasks. With this new feature of a Future Load graph, Load Analysis, you can see what tasks are overloading the selected resources or resource groups.

Discover extra load-related data and take measures to avoid overload in a Full Timeline + Future Load Graph + Bottleneck View

In this view, you can detect the bottlenecks in the Future Load graph by ordering your resources according to their load. You can select the most overwhelmed group or resource from the list, examine what is causing this overload, and take measures to eliminate the bottleneck with the Bottleneck Analysis feature.

Task Feasibility at Project Portfolio and Resource Levels: Time vs Capacity

What’s also important is that Epicflow shows load from several points of view: at the resource level and at the project portfolio level. Let us explain what we mean by this through the example of a Full Timeline View + Future Load graph.

As you can see in the upper part of the picture, the bars showing tasks’ timelines are marked with the colors similar to the ones in the Pipeline (red and yellow for critical tasks, blue and green for non-critical assignments). So this part denotes the general situation across the portfolio of projects and answers the question “Do I have enough time to complete the assigned tasks?” Unlike other PM and RM tools, Epicflow shows the task feasibility from the portfolio point of view, not just the project.

In the lower part of the picture, you can see the Future load graph, which shows the data at the resource level. In simple words, it gives an answer to the question “Do I have enough capacity to complete the assigned tasks?”

Example: Let’s say a resource has three tasks 20 hours each. This user can easily do them one by one, so they’re colored green. But together they make 60 hours, which overwhelms the resource, because his or her weekly capacity is 40 hours. So, in terms of one project, the workload is suitable, but in terms of the portfolio level, it’s not. This is why one bar is green on the graph and others are red.

Watch this video to see Group Tab feature in action:

Conclusion

With the new feature of Epicflow, Group Tab in a Task List, you can have a comprehensive view of your resource groups’ tasks including all task- and project-related details as well as make load and bottleneck analysis.

To learn more about Epicflow features for efficient multi-project resource management, contact our team at epicflow@epicflow.com or schedule a call with our expert at your convenience.