0070 - Subtasks
Hello ClickUp enthusiast! Greetings Ernesto.
The best way to introduce the subject of subtasks (in my opinion) is through a practical example that shows the application of the concept and that allows at the same time to identify possibilities for its use within the specific professional sector or personal level for which you use ClickUp.
A practical application for subtasks can be the methodology for establishing goals known as OKR's for its acronym: Objectives and Key Results. Objectives and Key Results is a simple methodology for setting, monitoring and measuring goals.
It is an alternative to another well-known goal-setting methodology known as SMART - also by its acronym: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.
OKR's have become widely known as very large and successful companies have used them to set and achieve their goals: Google, Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, Walmart, Target, ING Bank and a very long list of major companies of all kinds and sectors.
In essence it is about setting a goal and defining how to get there, how to achieve the goal. As such, OKRs are a simple tool that helps an organization achieve its goals by creating specific, measurable actions, as well as communicating and tracking progress towards them.
In ClickUp, the concept of subtasks is very simple - they are nested tasks; that is, tasks within other tasks.
ClickUp allows you to nest tasks within tasks up to 7 levels. In order to use this functionality it is necessary to enable what are known as "ClickApps", which are small applications within ClickUp. There is a large number of ClickApps available that add functionality to ClickUp, we will review some of these little by little, for now in order to access the complete list of Apps it is necessary to open the configuration menu by clicking on the lower part of the bar side on the Workspace icon:
That will present the configuration menu of both the Workspace and that of the user who started the session.
In the Workspace column, there is the ClickApps option, click on it to display a screen similar to the following:
As you can see, there are a large number of Apps available, in my work environment there are a total of 39 ClickApps, they may vary depending on your installation and contracted license.
Some are already enabled by default, like the first one displayed on the screen called "Automation". You can scroll the screen down to see the different Apps available, as I said before, we will review some of them in later articles.
Move the screen back to the start so that using the search functionality we can locate the App that interests us. Enter the word "Subtask" in the search field as shown in the following image:
As you can see, typing the word in the search field starts the filtering process of the Apps to show the ones you are looking for. In my case, the one that interests us is the second one that the filter shows: "Nested Subtasks". Very possibly this is already activated in your configuration, (otherwise, make sure that it is activated; that is, that the lower button of the interface is green) but I want to draw your attention to the possibility of changing the number of available nesting levels, the maximum possible is 7 (more than enough nesting levels!). Just to change the configuration, let's choose 3 levels of nesting:
Use the "Back" button at the top left of the screen to return to ClickUp.
Now we are able to create tasks and nest them up to three levels. Create a new list in your space and name it OKR:
Accept the default "Statuses" suggested by ClickUp by clicking the "Apply" button.
An example of an OKR for an IT department might be:
Objective: To improve the functional testing process of the developed software.
- KR1: Evaluate current testing tools by the end of the year.
- KR2: Reduce the number of errors closed by the cause: "It is not an error".
- KR3: No critical bugs recorded in the last week of testing.
In a new task, we will create the objective:
Once we save it, we click on it to go to the detail:
In the detail screen, the "Subtasks" are displayed, in this case, there is still no subtask created for this first objective. Click on "New Subtask" to capture the first Key Result (KR) as shown in the following image:
Press the "Save" button and we have the first subtask created. Similarly, we will create the other two Key Results, so that our subtasks are as follows:
Close the "parent" task window; i.e. Objective and return to "List" view:
Notice the new icon:
Which indicates that our task includes 3 subtasks. There are two ways to view subtasks from the list view. The first and easiest to use is through the "Subtasks" menu:
Select the option "Expand all" and the subtasks will be displayed in the view "below" the parent task (Objective) that we created:
The second way to show or hide subtasks is by clicking on the "arrow head" icon located at the beginning of the task, which allows you to show or hide the subtasks of the task in question. Through the menu, we open or close all the subtasks of all the tasks in our view, with the icon we open or close exclusively the subtasks of the task in question. Experiment by opening and closing subtasks in this way.
Subtasks are nothing more than a task included or nested in another, they have exactly the same characteristics as a normal task. Click on the first Key Result KR1 to display the task detail screen:
As you can see, it is the same detail of a normal task, the only difference is the first two lines of the screen. The first indicates that the task belongs to or is nested in another and the second indicates that it is the first of three available subtasks:
Using the second line you can change the order of the subtask in question. For example, if we want the KR1 to be displayed in the third position, just change the 1 to a 3 to achieve the goal:
Now if we close the detail of the subtask, we can see that the order of our subtasks has changed:
If the order of your subtasks did not change on the screen, it will be necessary to refresh your browser so that the information is updated, sometimes it is common to have to refresh since the browser does not do it automatically.
Let's assign subtasks to subtasks. Let's say that in order to achieve Key Result 1 we need to assign a responsible person to each of the current test tools that we use to carry out the corresponding evaluation. Let's say we have the following three tools:
- XYZ automation tool
- ABC bug management tool
- KLM test case management tool
And we will assign each of our testers a tool.
Let's click again on the KR1 subtask to access the detail screen and in the same way that we created a subtask in the objective, we create the first subtask and assign a person in charge:
Similarly, let's add the other two subtasks:
And if we go back to the list view, and click on the KR1 subtask's arrowhead icon, our goal looks like this:
So far we have two levels of subtasks, but in our configuration we specified that we could have up to 3 levels. Let's create the following six subtasks that we will use to evaluate the XYZ tool.
- Tool Spec Sheet
- Supplier
- Time we have used the tool
- Cost of maintenance and contracted technical support
- Number of employees trained in the use of the tool
- Current version and cost of updates
- Substitution alternatives in the market and competitive advantages of each one
These represent specific tasks to be carried out in order to conclude with one of the Key Results that we proposed. The screen should now look like this:
Now we can look at the three levels of depth that we specified that our tasks could have. Just to verify this configuration, if we access the detail of one of the specific tasks that we just created, we can see that the option to create subtasks no longer appears, because we have already reached the maximum level specified.
The option to create subtasks is not presented on this screen.
From my perspective, creating more than three levels of nesting is too much, three levels is perhaps the maximum manageable level, but ClickUp allows up to 7.
I hope that this brief example of OKR (Objectives and Key Results) has served to clearly exemplify what subtasks are and how they can be used.
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.