Content:
1. Visualize Milestones Across Your Projects’ Lifecycle (Beta)
2. New Card & Initiatives View Settings (Available Upon Request)
3. Answer Your Questions Faster Than Ever with Businessmap AI (Available Upon Request)!
4. Planned Start/End Dates Improvements
5. Easily Filter Your Work by Different Properties Across Boards
6. Analyze Cards Moved to Other Boards in Board Flow Metrics
7. Advanced Search Improvements
7.1. Dedicated Excel Tab for Links After Export
7.2. Aggregate Your Search Data
8. Other Improvements
Welcome to version 10.9 of Businessmap! With our first release for 2024, we’ve got many exciting updates and important news to share with you, so let’s get started!
1. Visualize Milestones Across Your Projects’ Lifecycle (Beta)
To improve your project management process, our system will now support Milestones in the Planning View of your Initiatives Workflows. As they’re still under development, we’re releasing them in a Beta version, so feel free to give us your feedback at support@businessmap.io.
Let’s see how you can use them in practice.
In the Planning View of our Initiatives Workflow, you can create a new milestone from the “+” button in the header.
You will notice that setting the details of a milestone closely resembles creating new card elements. One of the main differences is that you need to input a date for the milestone (№4).
Once you’re done, the newly created milestone will appear in the dates section of the Planning View.
Keep in mind that you can have multiple milestones on a given date, and clicking on their icon will feature them in a list format.
With a drag and drop, you can connect a milestone to an initiative and then filter to see only those initiatives that are associated with a given milestone.
As we mentioned, the Milestones are still in early development, and we will have a lot more improvements coming your way soon. In the meantime, you can learn more here, and don’t hesitate to contact us with your feedback.
2. New Card & Initiatives View Settings (Available Upon Request)
To improve your board visualization, we’ve been working on brand-new view settings for both your cards and initiatives. Keep in mind that for the time being, these view settings will be available ONLY upon request per account, not per user! In other words, to prevent any heavy disruptions, the conventional way to configure your board view will remain UNCHANGED UNLESS you request the new settings.
Here’s a sneak peek into the new way of configuring your board views.
The main improvement is that we give you dedicated sections + View Levels to configure how you see BOTH your cards and initiatives in a single environment.
You will also be able to save default settings for the different views and restore them, unlike before. On top of the existing visualization options for your board view, we’ve added several new capabilities too.
To get to know the changes in more detail, we invite you to check out our dedicated article. And if you wish to test the new views, make sure you contact our Support team.
3. Answer Your Questions Faster Than Ever with Businessmap AI (Available Upon Request)!
As we’re in the era of AI, we’ve been developing our own experimental solution in the form of an AI Help assistant. For the time being, it will be available ONLY UPON REQUEST.
For those of you who would like to experiment, we will provide you with an exclusive access to the assistant. It will be available in the Help Center, and you can use it as an additional extension to our product support.
As of right now, the Businessmap AI assistant will be able to answer product-related questions. With upcoming releases, our plan is to keep enhancing the chatbot, so it starts answering more technical questions as well as giving you advice on specific use cases.
To gain access to our experimental AI solution, don’t hesitate to contact our support team. Also, make sure you check out our dedicated article for more information.
4. Planned Start/End Dates Improvements
Moving on, to better accommodate your project management work, we’re adding the planned start/end date properties across several new places in the software. Let’s summarize them below.
- Board filter – you can now filter initiatives on boards based on their planned start/end date.
- Card Links Tab – the properties will also be available in the configuration settings inside the Links tab of your cards.
- Time-Based Business Rule – to help you cover more automation scenarios, you can now use planned start/end dates as triggers in the Time-Based Business Rule.
5. Easily Filter Your Work by Different Properties Across Boards
To unlock more flexibility across your boards, we’ve changed the board filter’s behavior so you can choose specifically what properties to filter your cards and initiatives by.
To do this, we’re giving you a dedicated “Settings” modal where you can select to filter your cards and initiatives by:
- Card ID
- Title
- Owner
- Tags
- Custom fields (choosing this option takes into account only custom field values and will not include fields of type “vote” and “card picker”).
6. Analyze Cards Moved to Other Boards in Board Flow Metrics
To help you extract more accurate data from our Board Flow Metrics widget, we’re adding a new option to “Include cards moved to other boards”.
Once you turn it on, the widget will give you data about cards that have been moved to other boards even if they departured the current board from the “Backlog”, “Requested” or “In Progress” sections.
Keep in mind that if disabled, cards that have gone through the entire process (reached the Done column) and then moved to another board will still be present in the results.
7. Advanced Search Improvements
Moving forward, we’re introducing several improvements in our Advanced Search too.
Let’s quickly go over them.
7.1. Dedicated Excel Tab for Links After Export
To help you gain more condensed information from the Links column in the Advanced Search, we’ve improved the data visualization once you’ve exported your search results. From now on, every exported search that includes “Links” will generate a separate Excel tab.
There, you will see a breakdown of your linked work data which includes the card’s title, board name, workflow name, etc.
Note: Depending on your permissions, you can see limited data.
7.2. Aggregate Your Search Data
Furthermore, we’re adding the option to aggregate your cycle time (or any other numeric value you choose from the results configuration) in the bar chart view of the Advanced Search. From now on, you will see the function to group your search results by the following parameters:
- Count – the number of cards in a specific group
- Sum – the sum of a given card's metric value in a specific group
- Average – the card’s average metric value in a specific group
- Min/Max - the minimum and maximum card’s metric value in a specific group
8. Other Improvements
- Replace existing links via Business Rules
When using “link the card” action across your business rules (where that’s applicable), you can now choose to remove the existing parent/child/successor/predecessor/relative links from the trigger card.
- Drilldown your hierarchy in the Initiatives & Outcomes dashboard
To improve the visualization of the Initiatives & Outcomes dashboard, we’re releasing the ability to enter a specific initiative’s hierarchy which will maintain your focus only on the current hierarchy. You can then easily go back up one, two, or more levels across the hierarchy with the breadcrumbs on top of the table.
- Add stickers while creating cards/templates
From now on, you will be able to quickly add stickers to your cards even when you’re creating them. This includes creating new cards through links or generating templates (as well as using an existing card’s sticker when saving it as a template).
- Exclude non-working days in card templates
Finally, it’s now possible to exclude your non-working days when setting your card template’s deadline.
Enjoy your work with version 10.9, and if you need any help, feel free to reach out!