A little anecdote. My first big project 23 years ago was a nationwide rollout of 5000 PCs here in Japan. I wanted to “do the right thing”, so I got a MS Project license and put heaps of tasks in there, trying to link them all together. It was a nightmare. Every little change to a date, would set off a massive chain reaction that would completely mess the gantt chart up. Also, it was so large that you had to print it on a 20 A4 sheets and paste it up on the wall. Kind of silly. Mid project, I changed tack and made the gantt more high level, keeping detail tasks in Excel.
With Fibery and indeed other kanban systems, the tasks are generally something that one person can complete from start to finish, and are grouped in something else. So the detail level is pretty “fine” and it has the potential to be pretty similar in look to a massive gantt chart.
Can anyone comment what’s best/good practice in a kanban system like Fibery for:
sequencing tasks in the case there’s a clear & obvious dependency where task one has to be before task two (let the paint dry before bringing in furniture)
can I link an entity to itself in app design, so I can select a predecessor?
grouping tasks in some container, and reporting on the container - that is, if I’m running a big project, generally for stakeholders I don’t want to show every task at a meeting with them. Instead, in say, an ERP rollout, I want to talk about high level status and blockers like “Finance is on track, good job”, “EDI is yellow and we need to place the software PO by this Friday”, or “Warehouse is completely behind and we need everyone to get on board”.
is the concept like the GIST planning app? That is, I would report status by some field on Step Projects, which are my general work streams mentioned here, Finance, EDI, Warehouse? Maybe I can have a custom field that indicates their general status and level of blockedness.
Thoughts and ideas appreciated! Just want to make sure I’m thinking correctly about all this.
I’m also trying to get some basic dependency handling in Fibery.
Would be curious for any input from @mdubakov or team about potentially using buttons & formulas to accomplish this while we are waiting for development of greater handling of this need?
Can I use a button to inform the assignee of a dependent task entity that the predecessor is done, and work can start on the “dependent” task?
So here, say I have an entity “tasks”:
I create a one-to-one relationship between tasks, call it “dependent” and “predecessor”
I’d like the button, when clicked, to move the “dependent” to a state of my choosing, say from “waiting” to “to do,”
I’d like to inform the assignee via notification that the predecessor is complete and work can be started on this dependency
I’d like to set up a “start date” field in the dependent task, and have that filled on the moment this button is pushed
I’d like to write into the comment field, perhaps via API, that the task was started because the predecessor was completed
As far as linking subsequent dependencies, I realize that might be hard via the one action between just these two dependent tasks. But since the tasks down the line are going to be still waiting, if I could keep this process going say in a string of 7 - 8 tasks, we’d have some “just in time” movement of the tasks, which I think would be OK for my need for now.
Another thing I’d like to do ideally right now is have all these tasks in another Entity called “Project” with a date field called “anticipated completion date.” If that field could rollup dates from the tasks within, that would be very useful right now, too,
The solution you’ve described can indeed be implemented with an action button. I also believe it would be the best solution given the current Fibery functionality.
I suggest action button to:
Move the predecessor to the final state (Fibery APIsetStateToFinal).
Set the dependent’s start date = now.
Add a comment to the dependent (assignees will get notified automatically)
Things would become easier once we have proper automation with trigger → action . So far some manual labor is needed
If that field could rollup dates from the tasks within, that would be very useful right now, too
Indeed! Improvements to formulas are coming this spring, so stay tuned.
Anton, and thank you for the detailed response! I have not taken a deep dive into formulas yet - maybe if I did I would have figured out some of this on my own, but I am not a developer so they are still challenging to me!
It’s great to see that I can do a lot to emulate Gantt/Dependency stuff built natively into other apps, very exciting!
If you have a moment, could you let me know if I can choose in Formulas any other state aside from “Final”? Is there a “state picker”? I’d like to have the option to move the state to say “to do” as well as notify the assignee once the predecessor is complete.
I will dive in here and explore more based on your instructions, thanks again!
Hi @antoniokov We are on the move to Fibery as well, had some extensive Chat with @Polina_Zenevich at intercom and we come across a Fibery Use case for Ticket Tracking including SLA Management. Means escalating a sorting tasks (Incidents, Issues etc) based on Response Time SLA. Are formulas and Triggers in general agood way for things like this?
. So far some manual labor is needed 