Assigning Advances to Collaborators
How to assign an advance to a collaborator in BackOps from an advance template, scope it to an area or activity, and adjust its modules after assignment.
An advance is the live form one collaborator fills in. Each collaborator gets their own advance, started from an advance template and adjusted to what that collaborator needs to provide. An advance can also be scoped to an area, an activity, or both, so it shows up where the production team works.
Assign an Advance from a Collaborator
Open the collaborator
Assign an advance
Choose Assign advance from the collaborator's actions menu. On a collaborator with no advances yet, the Advance tab also offers Assign an advance.
Pick a template and name it
Select an Advance template. The advance name fills in from the template; change it if you like, for example "Mainstage Backline".
The new advance appears on the collaborator's Advance tab with the template's modules and settings.
Add an Advance from an Area or Activity
You can also start from the place the advance is about. On an area's Advance tab or an activity's Advances tab, select Add advance, then choose the collaborator, the advance template, and a name. The advance is created for that collaborator and scoped to the area or activity you started from.
Scoping to Areas and Activities
An advance can be scoped to one area, one activity, or both. An advance with neither applies to the whole event.
Scoping makes the advance visible in context. In the app, you set the scope by creating the advance from the area or activity. An advance scoped to an area appears on that area's Advance tab and in the area's day sheet. An advance scoped to an activity appears on that activity's Advances tab. If several bands play the same stage, scoping each band's advance to the stage area and to their performance lets the production team see each show's requirements from either the area or the schedule.
After Assignment
Assigning an advance does not lock it. In the app, you can add modules to an existing advance from an area's or activity's advance pages with Add module. A module template can be added to an advance only once.
Each module on an advance carries its own settings. All but the reviewer are copied from the template:
- Due date
- Required
- Task tracking
- Task review
- Assigned reviewer, the person responsible for reviewing that module's answers
Changing these settings, reordering or removing modules, and renaming, rescoping, or deleting an advance are available through the BackOps API; the app does not show controls for them yet. Every change affects only that advance, never the advance template or other collaborators' advances. When an advance's area or activity is changed, the new values replace the old ones, and leaving one empty removes it.
Advances are assigned one collaborator at a time.
Deleting an advance permanently removes its modules, answers, requests, and tracking tasks. Removing a module from an advance does the same for that module. Neither can be undone.
If any module on the template is task tracked, the event needs its advance task status mapping before the advance can be created. See Task Tracking.