Reflections on building a task manager

It is kind of weird how your mind get wired to certain ways of working. Even more weird is when you are forced to do things differently you actually find that those ways may not be the best way to do things. When building the Task Management using IPS Pages I found this to be particularly true...

Hierarchies

Coming from 10 years working, designing and educating for Jira I had certain things hardwired into the way I designed the Task management database here on the site. The Hierarchy of issues for example has constantly been an issue in Jira. In Pages there are no hierarchies and after trying to hack it a bit I realized that I can actually have any hierarchy without having to build it.

By adding a database relation field pointing to the same database I can create a bidirectional link between the tasks. I use this to allow each task to define a parent issue. By doing this I can create any structure I want. In the issue view itself this linkage is shown for the parent link, but it also shows that link from the other end. This allows me to show tasks as subtasks for any task that have set the task as its parent.

I added a form below the subtasks that automatically add the parent link of the task you create them from. That makes it very fast to create subtasks as well.

Show all and use the filters

At first, I wanted to hide subtasks to get that same look as in Jira. Once I stepped away from the hierarchy idea I also realized that since I no longer had a hierarchy that was no reason to hide anything. Everything is just tasks to be done, and I added both the issue type and the assignee fields as filters. This makes it very flexible as I can show tasks on any level assigned to anyone, or I can just look at all activities at once.

I think this will be even more powerful when I add the sorting feature, so I can drag and drop things to set the order of items. Even without that I really love the flexibility these filters provide.

Notifications

Notifications are something that is very annoying in Jira and at first I had my mind set on making sure you get notified when you get assigned and so on. Once I started to look into it however I realized that this is actually not something that benefit most users. I started to consider how many times I have set up rules for notifications from Jira just to get rid of them and how many times I actually had any action taken based on a notification.

I realized that it is far better to communicate if I want to make sure the assignee take some form of action. This is very easily done using the comment form with a mention.

A good way to challenge your views

Overall I think I have challenged my views on what a task management should look and behave like. Old ways are not always the best, and it is refreshing to consider things from different angles because the platform forces you into new ways of defining your workflow.

More lessons to be learned.

I look forward to digging deeper into this and to see if I should add a second database for support requests, or use the same. The idea of one single entity for support kind of appeals to me to be honest, and I am playing with the idea of adding different issue types to different categories to some extent. I might even add support articles, so I can tie them into a support ticket and so on.

There is so much to explore and learn.