Tracking Advance Progress with Tasks
How task tracking on advance modules creates tasks in BackOps and moves them through To Do, Needs Review, Done, and Archived as collaborators answer and reviewers review.
Task tracking connects advancing to project management. When a module is task tracked, BackOps creates tasks for it and moves them through your task statuses as collaborators answer and reviewers review. The production team gets a live task view of advancing without creating or updating a single task by hand.
Set Up the Status Mapping First
Task tracking uses an advance task status mapping, set once per event, that links four advance states to task statuses you already use:
- To Do: nothing has been answered yet.
- Needs Review: an answer is waiting for a reviewer.
- Done: the answer is complete, or a reviewer has signed off.
- Archived: tracking was turned off.
Open Project Management settings
Map the advance states
Setting the mapping needs project management admin rights, and all four statuses must belong to the event.
Task tracking does not work until the mapping exists. Creating an advance from a template with a tracked module fails without it, and turning tracking on for a module creates no tasks.
What Gets Created
When an advance has a tracked module, BackOps creates:
- One task for the advance, named after it.
- One task for each tracked module, named after the module's label, due on the module's due date, with the module's assigned reviewer as its reviewer.
- One task under the module for each question block and each request block.
Every task is assigned to the collaborator and starts at To Do. A request block has one task for the whole block, not one per line item. The module and advance tasks follow the status of the tasks under them.
How Tasks Move
What moves a block's task depends on whether the module requires task review.
When task review is required:
- An answer, a new request line item, or a change to either moves the task to Needs Review.
- Deleting a request line item, or changing a request's approval, also moves it to Needs Review.
- A review moves it to Done once every reviewer on the task has signed off.
When task review is not required, an answer moves its task straight to Done, and clearing a question's answer moves it back to To Do. Deleting a request line item still moves its task to Needs Review.
Changing a module's due date moves its tasks' due dates with it.
flowchart LR
TD["To Do"] -->|"Answer"| NR["Needs Review"]
NR -->|"Review"| D["Done"]
D -->|"Answer changes"| NR
TD -->|"Answer, no review required"| D
NR -->|"Tracking off"| A["Archived"]
D -->|"Tracking off"| ATurning Tracking On and Off
Task tracking is set per module, not per advance. Turn it on for a module in an advance template, in Event settings or in your organization's library, and every advance created from that template starts with it. On an advance that already exists, tracking can be turned on or off per module through the BackOps API.
Turning tracking off moves the module's tasks to Archived. Turning it on again creates a fresh set of tasks starting at To Do; the archived ones stay archived. Removing a module from an advance, or deleting the advance, deletes its tasks.