Introducing Project Planning

Your friends at Flow have been working hard on all kinds of good things, and today we’re really excited to share some features that will help you better plan and understand your projects in Flow.

Project management doesn’t need to be a headache. We’re making it really simple to put your projects on the calendar, and easy to see how your projects are doing with straightforward reporting everyone on your team can understand.

Adding a start and end date to a project is an awesome way to see how all your biggest efforts fit together. To say that we’re just giving you the ability to add a timeline to a project however, is a bit of an understatement.

Check out the short video for quick overview, or read on for a full tour of what’s new.

Project Calendar

We’ve added a project timeline view to the calendar. From here you’re able to get a bird’s-eye view of all your active projects and how they’re progressing. We’ve added some color coding to projects so you’ll know what’s Upcoming (Light Blue), On Schedule (Blue), Behind Schedule (Orange), Overdue (Red), Complete (Green), and Archived (Gray). In case you find yourself wishing you could assign custom colours to projects, we wish that for you too! Which is why we plan on releasing custom colour support soon.

Hovering over a project timeline provides information about that project: Who’s got tasks in the project, how many tasks are left, and how many are completed. Faces are sorted by who’s got the most open tasks 😉. If you hover for a little longer the other projects will fade out so you can focus on the project you’re interested in. 

Need a little more time on a project? A little less time? In addition to our Project Dates picker, you can grab either end of a timeline in the calendar to adjust it.

New projects can also be created right from the project calendar, just hover over the bottom of a day and click “New Project”. 

If you’d like to see the tasks for all the active projects on a day, simply hover over the top of a day and click “View Tasks”. Flow will show you all the open tasks for the projects active that day. 

Project Pane

We quickly realized that jumping back and forth between the Project Calendar and the existing project view wasn’t ideal, so we decided to give you a Project Pane! The Project Pane has all the powers of a regular project, but the added benefit of letting you click through all your different projects on the calendar without leaving it behind. If you’d like to expand a project pane into a full project view, there’s a little button for that (and the other way around too).

Project Reporting

We’ve added some really handy task counts to our projects, so that you can quickly see the total number of both open and completed tasks. With a bit of math based on how many tasks are completed, and how much time is left. We also show a progress meter, so that at a glance, you can quickly see how a project is progressing:

• If a project’s task completion percentage is less than the amount of time that is left in the project, Flow will display that project as behind schedule (orange). 
• If a project is past its due date and still contains tasks, Flow will display that project as overdue (red). 

Flow gives about 15% leniency at the beginning of a project, 10% in the middle, and 0% towards the end. This dial will show in both the project pane and the…

New Project View

Things were getting a little crazy with all these fancy new project features, so we had to simplify the project header view. Project Notes and statuses now live along the left side of a project in Kanban mode, which simplifies scrolling greatly (especially for Windows users (I promise we love you)).

Project timelines can be added to a project by clicking “Add a project timeline”. Once a timeline is added, you’ll see the project tracker dial. Definitely give that a whirl, otherwise you won’t see any projects on the project calendar either 😀.  If your team doesn’t work weekends, be sure to check the “Exclude weekends” option so that Saturday and Sunday are removed from your project status calculation.

The new filter field is now 100% less confusing to use and a little easier on the eyes. 

You can collapse a project into a project pane with this handy little guy.

Ever wanted to link to a project in Flow? Well we’ve added a “Copy Link” button- go wild.

Favoriting projects for the side bar (or the favorite projects view in the project calendar) is now a little more adorable as well. 

That’s it! We hope this simplifies your project management process and helps your team get stuff done! There’s more great stuff cooking that we can’t wait to show you. Stay tuned.