Question

There are some PMs who enter the tasks for their projects and some devs who do the tasks. the tasks are divided by multiple projects / milestones.

So how should managers enter new planned tasks (which should not yet be seen and done be developers).

How can i do the following: create a "work to do filter" that will show me all the tasks in development in all projects and all milestones, but except that "planned tasks".

It seems the only way to do it is to use max priority value (7) and exclude it from "work to do" filter with "<" priority condition. But this does not seem right. Another thing that came to my mind is to create cases as some kind of resolved status (which isn't good also, because requires one additional step in task creation process)

This gets even worse because a virtual user "up for grabs" will still recieve email notifications even for planned tasks (which, of course, should not happen).

Answer 1

We also populate FB with cases way ahead of when we need them for similar reasons. We break the project down into reasonable milestones and assign the work out. We also have regular team meetings / stand ups and discuss what we should be working on regularly. We haven't had any problems with people working ahead for several reasons:

1. Team members understand the order of the milestones and use common sense to spend effort in the right project phase.
2. If someone does start work on a task ahead of schedule... they probably should. One of the strengths of FB over something like MS Project is that it doesn't force people to wait around unnecessarily. If someone can start work ahead of time, why wouldn't they? If there is a legitimate reason people shouldn't be working on a particular item ahead of time, that should come out in the regular team meetings.

Answer 2

I don't see how the number of projects is an issue. FB automatically manages this as long as you have them separated somehow.

You also don't have to have milestone dependencies. FB will order things by the milestone completion dates.

Finally, it's ok for tasks to be incomplete. There are many ways to manage this. First off, you can create different statuses that describe common states (on hold, pending review, missing materials, etc.) or you can tag items with meaningful descriptions. You could even use area for this activity.

If the above isn't addressing your problem, I may need you to explain it a different way to be able to help.

Happy New Year