Add a Job Board to Workflow Manager interfaces

[PaulBrandt]

I would like to see a Job Board added to the Workflow Manager interfaces. Something similar in functionality to the kanban boards in software development circles. I would like to be able to choose different views for the columns of the board, one might be based on Due date, so Not Started, On Time, Due Tomorrow and Late. Another one might be based on workflow completion, Not Started, In Progress, On Hold, Canceled. I'm sure there are others, so the ability to let the user choose their own categories for the board columns would be ideal, and users of the system would likely want different views of the board than administrators.

[Anonymous User]

Hi Paul,

This idea is being considered as an alternate way to visualize jobs and in particular get a sense of how many jobs are at a particular step at any given time to try to avoid bottlenecks.

You would be able to drag the tiles around to change things like priority depending on the board configuration

Where the idea has some issues is when you're actually running the work. The board is more a representation of the stages that a job moves through, but those steps are driven by a workflow diagram and each step has an action associated to it that Workflow Manager often drives directly (running a gp tool, asking a question, opening a mapping step). This is different that a kanban board for software development where it is more of a simple status tracking, the board isn't 'helping you code' it's just doing some high level task management. 

This is in our product plan though for the new service-architecture but not on the nearterm radar till we work out some additional considerations, but we'll keep an eye on the upvotes and comments here. 🙂

Thanks for the contribution,

Michael

[PaulBrandt]

Hi Michael,

Sorry for the long delayed response to your comment somehow I missed it. I have been recently playing around with the 10.8.1 Service Based Workflow app. I really like the new interface. I can see your concerns about performing the work from the job cards. I guess my thoughts are that the Job Board idea would be most useful for managers trying to assign/evaluate work loads rather than for users performing job tasks. This idea came about as a result of some work we were doing for a client that wanted to be able to see the flow of jobs through their system, and didn't necessarily care about being able to perform work on the individual jobs. In their case the primary objective was to identify bottlenecks in their workflows to further streamline the processes. We pitched this Job Board idea to them, but ended up ultimately going with a more out of the box Dashboards solution, where they can filter the jobs they are viewing on different criteria such as Due Date, Current Job Status, Assignment, all the way down to the individual job where they can see a summary of edits that were made and which feature classes were modified. The Dashboard allows them to quickly identify jobs that are taking longer than expected, and being able to drill down to the details helps to allow users to answer basic questions about the jobs.

[Anonymous User]

@PaulBrandt Hi Paul, that's similar to another use case. They want to see the jobs in board form as a way to evaluate bottlenecks. Every step can only have a certain number of active jobs and if there are an excess in that step it is easily visible when shown as a job board. The user then goes and works on one of the excess. It's a good idea, it'll take a little while for us to get to though. 🙂

Cheers,

Michael