Calendar Timelines for Projects

A while ago we introduced the timeline feature, which comes with day grid, week grid, month grid and year grid views, to add to the standard day, week and month views.

This allows you to see a list of views down the lefthand side of the screen (e.g. audits, due, meetings, expiring certificates or whatever you keep track of) and the events flowing in date order from left to right across the screen.

Our new feature released for beta testing today allows you to split out events from a single view into different tracks down the lefthand side of the screen. In other words, instead of having to create a different view for each track, which could be cumbersome if there are many, you can just specify a field to generate the tracks from.

For example, if we have a view of project milestones like this New Product Development tracker:

we can choose to split on the ‘name’ field (Beef Pie is shown above), resulting in a calendar grid view like this:

Now it’s easy to keep track of the various stages of multiple projects on one screen, to see when you may need to requisition more resources or move things around.

In this example we’ve also used the colouring feature introduced recently – those colours are picked up in the calendar grid view.

This feature will be working it’s way into our new Stage Gates module for our agile:NPDtech product coming soon but it’s also available now for any customer to use for their own bespoke systems, at no charge while being beta tested. As a new feature in testing, please let us know what you think, including any glitches you come across or improvements you can think of.

Administrator set up

As an administrator, enabling this is easy – create a text calculation in the view you want to use called ‘calendar splitter’. Make the output of this the items you want to create calendar tracks for. In the example above for example, we just created the calculation as {product name}. You can then mark the calculation as hidden if users don’t need to see it.

Then add that view to your calendar.

We hope you find it useful and please do let us know any other applications you think of.