0050 Basic - The views in ClickUp - Part 2
Hello ClickUp enthusiast! Greetings from Ernesto.
Continuing with the review of views in ClickUp, one that is somewhat similar to the calendar view is the "Gantt" view, this view is widely used in planning, managing and monitoring projects. Click on the "+ View" button (+ View) and select the "Gantt" option, also select the "Pin view" option, this time we will not assign a name (by default the view will be called Gantt) and click the "Add View" button to get a screen similar to the following image:
Notice that now the first view next to our list name is the "Gantt" with a "pin" icon that means it's pinned to the screen, since we selected the "Pin view" option.
The tasks are presented sequentially on a horizontal calendar, showing the duration of each of them: several days, one day and less than one day.
The duration of the tasks can be adjusted on the Gantt by lengthening or shortening the ends of the task on the calendar. You can drag the task bar on the graph to move it to an earlier or later date without changing its duration.
It is also possible to change the scale of the calendar to facilitate the visualization of the tasks on the calendar, it has a zoom-in effect to visualize the entire project or the detail of a portion of it. To change the scale click the "Week/Day" button as shown in the figure to select the scale, try the different options:
At the top of the Gantt, the progress of the project is displayed, ClickUp measures the progress of the project based on the tasks that have been closed or completed. In theory, this should align with the completion dates of the tasks. In our example, we can see that we have a progress of 12.5% in the "Business trip" project. Hover over the green bar at the top of the Gantt to see this message:
One of our tasks, in this case "Fix transportation" has the status of "Closed", this corresponds to 12.5% (1 task out of 8) completed. This task that we closed does not even have a start or end date, so it is not shown in the Gantt, if you move the cursor over the corresponding line you will see the following message on the screen:
"Click to Schedule Task" (Click to Schedule Task).
I will adjust the task so that its status changes to "To Do", I will assign a start and end date (simply by dragging the task on the Gantt, the dates are assigned automatically), I will assign a person as responsible and I will change the name to "Transportation reservation" . I will also reorganize the tasks so that they are shown in chronological order of how they will be carried out; either manually, by dragging the names on the left side of the screen or by using the "Sort by" menu and selecting the "Start date" option, so that now the project shows as:
Notice that now no progress is shown on the project as no tasks are finished or closed yet. It is also important to point out that I have assigned a couple of tasks not only a start and end date but also a start and end time, so the bar that represents them in the Gantt is narrower and does not cover the full day but only a fraction of it.
To wrap up the Gantt view, I just want to add one more feature that is very common to use. Commonly, there are tasks that depend on a previous task having finished in order to start, this establishes a dependency between the tasks. For example, in order to book the hotel and ground transportation, I have to have the flights booked first, there is a dependency between these tasks. In order to establish this relationship, at the end of the 'Book and confirm flights' task bar, there is a small drag point that must be used to connect it with the drag point at the beginning of the 'Book and confirm flights' task, connecting these two points establishes the relationship that 'Reserve and confirm hotel' cannot start before 'Reserve and confirm flight' finishes or that 'Reserve and confirm flight' is blocking the start of 'Reserve and confirm hotel'.
Visualization of drag points:
Establishing a relationship by connecting the drag point at the end of one task with the drag point at the start of the next:
If we click on the name of the task "Book and confirm flights" we can see the screen with its details. The screen shows an icon on the screen name indicating that "Book and confirm flights" is blocking 1 task:
If we click on the icon, the "Relationships" section will be displayed at the bottom of the screen, showing the details of the relationship: "Blocking (Blocking) Make hotel reservation":
I can add another relationship from this same screen by selecting the "Add" button to the right of "Relationships". By clicking on it, select the "Dependency" option and then "Blocking" option as shown below:
It is important to note that a task can also be related to "another" task or to a document, options that we will analyze on another occasion.
When selecting "Blocking", we have to indicate the name of the task that is being blocked, ClickUp will present a list of all the tasks that have been used recently but offers the option to search for tasks on all the available spaces in my " Workspace", this means that I can relate tasks from different lists (projects), a very powerful feature that ClickUp offers.
From the list of "recent" tasks that is displayed, select the task "Transportation reservation":
Note that to facilitate the selection of the task, you can search by name since the list of tasks could be very long.
Selecting this task adds it to the "Relationships" section under "Dependencies" as shown below:
Finally, if we close the task detail window, we will return to the Gantt view, which now shows the relationship that we established manually together with the first relationship that we established graphically:
The Gantt view offers many advantages for project management and can be easily added to our list of views in order to have this visualization of tasks available.
We will review a last view that is very practical to be able to manage the workload of a team, it is called "Box" view, click on "+ View" and select this option, assign the name of "Cards" for this view and click the "Add View" button:
The new view will present a card for each one of the participants in the project showing the number of assigned tasks, tasks completed, the percentage of progress and the workload.
We can see the detail of the tasks on this view so that we can make some changes to the tasks and see how these are reflected in the view. Each card has a downward arrow icon (⏬) at the top right, by clicking on each of the cards the details are displayed:
The tasks are presented grouped by status, by moving the cursor over the color side bar that represents the status, the bar widens so that we can click to change the status of a task. For example, change the status of the task in process to completed:
Let's look at the changes in the card itself and in the workload:
Now the progress is 25% (upper right of the card) same information that is represented in the "Workload" of the card on the left. In addition, the number of tasks "Not done" and "Done" are shown.
A field that we have not analyzed and that is present in all tasks is the "Estimate task" field, with this field we can make an estimate of the time needed to complete the task. Click on the hourglass on the card to estimate the time of the task; For example, in the task "Plan the business agenda of the trip" we had assigned 5 days for its completion, we can estimate that it will consume 20 hours (4 hours per day):
In a similar way, allocate the estimate of hours that you consider necessary for all the tasks in the project:
Until now we have seen the workload based on the number of tasks assigned to each person in charge, now let's see the workload based on the estimated hours of work. At the top left is the "Workload" option, at the moment the selected option is "number of tasks". Click on this button and select the "Time Estimate" option:
Now the workload is based on the "estimated hours" that we assign to the tasks and the cards now show the corresponding information:
Undoubtedly a very useful view to analyze the workload of the team and that also allows you to adjust and balance tasks. This view is related to a very common graph called "burndown chart" which shows the amount of work that has been completed and the total work remaining. Very useful to analyze the progress in projects.
We have reviewed some of the views that ClickUp offers to display the tasks, as we saw at the beginning there are some more that we will surely review later, but in my opinion these are the most important and those that offer the greatest value for the analysis and planning of Projects.
Until next time and remember that the standardization of plans and processes does nothing more than improve the quality of the result and repeated iterations generate an upward spiral.