In this product update:
1. Manage Custom Field Access with New Custom Field Categories
1.1. Custom Field Categories in the Card Details
1.2. Custom Field Categories in the Custom Field Administration
2. Introducing Planning View in Initiatives for Better Forecasting
3. Share Important Company Updates with Announcements
4. Calculate the Actual Duration of Initiatives
5. Other Improvements
5.1. New Notification Option in “Recurring Update Cards” Business Rules
5.2. Subtask Deadlines Available in More Areas of the Account
5.3. Improvement in the Cycle Time per Column Report
6. Updates from Our Solutions Architecture Team
Welcome to Businessmap 10.16! We’re excited to share what’s coming to the product this month, starting with more flexible custom field management permissions:
1. Manage Custom Field Access with New Custom Field Categories
Custom field categories empower Account Owners to precisely control who can manage custom fields within the account. As an Account Owner, this feature allows you to specify user permissions for creating, editing, and deleting custom fields within each category. By using these categories, you can ensure that fields, which are critical for company-wide governance, can only be managed by authorized users. Categories also let you group custom fields by purpose or topic, making it easy to organize work.
A common use case is to group governance-related custom fields in a category and allow only certain users to manage them, while letting all users manage other fields. Alternatively, you may use categories to selectively extend management access to certain fields, while limiting general management permissions to others.
Important: Account Owners and users with the "Manage Card Elements" admin privilege have unrestricted access to manage custom fields, regardless of category permissions. However, category permissions override the Card Control settings. For example, if Card Controls allow everyone to manage custom fields, but a category restricts access to Account Owners/Admins, only Account Owners and Admins can manage fields in that category.
Learn more about creating categories and how permissions work in our Custom Field Categories guide.
1.1. Custom Field Categories in the Card Details
To support this feature, it’s now also possible to group custom fields by category inside the card.
1.2. Custom Field Categories in the Custom Field Administration
We've added a new column to the custom fields panel in Administration that displays each field's category. Every custom field can have only one category at a time.
2. Introducing Planning View in Initiatives for Better Forecasting
To help you better plan and forecast your work on an initiative level, we’ve revamped our Forecasting feature. It now includes a planning view and the previous forecasting feature is still accessible under the "What if Analysis" panel.
The initiative planning view has similar functionalities to the standard planning view, with one key difference: it shows both cards and initiatives that are linked to the current item, thus offering a complete overview of your work hierarchy. Additionally, for cards in Cards Workflows, there’s a separate setting called “Cards Planning” that lets you plan and schedule card durations on the timeline depending on their deadline and size.
Important: Although you can schedule cards through this planning capability, there is no "Planned start date" field for the cards in the Cards workflow. We recommend starting the work based on your actual capacity (WIP limits have not been exceeded) and not based on a schedule. I.e. scheduling is most welcome on initiative level, but flow is encouraged on cards level.
The duration is calculated by subtracting the card’s size from its deadline. You can see it in action below:
Learn more about this forecasting feature.
3. Share Important Company Updates with Announcements
Next, we’re excited to introduce a feature designed to streamline your communication across the account. Announcements allow Account Owners to share key news and updates with the entire team or specific users, with control over how long these messages are visible. Announcements are displayed at the top of the Help Center menu.
In addition to internal announcements, Businessmap can also create system announcements to notify Account Owners and other users about important updates, such as scheduled maintenance. Learn more in our guide on Announcements.
4. Calculate the Actual Duration of Initiatives
You can now use the “actual start date” and “actual end date” of initiatives as dynamic values when building date-related calculated formulas. A common use case here is to create a formula that subtracts the actual start date from the actual end date, allowing you to visualize the initiative's duration directly in a calculated custom field.
5. Other Improvements
5.1. New Notification Option in “Recurring Update Cards” Business Rules
We’ve added a new option to the “Recurring Update Cards” business rule that allows you to receive notifications for relevant cards on every rule execution, even if the cards status hasn’t changed. To enable this, simply check the "Send notification on every rule execution" box in the rule settings.
If disabled, notifications will only be sent for cards that have been moved since the last rule execution.
5.2. Subtask Deadlines Available in More Areas of the Account
In 10.15, we introduced subtask deadlines, and now we’re extending their availability in other areas of the account. You will now see subtask deadlines in the My Queue and Worklog menu, as well as the Calendar.
5.3. Improvement in the Cycle Time per Column Report
To give you a better overview of your cards’ blocked data, we’ve added two new options in the Configure results menu — “Blocked times in column” and “Total block time.” Additionally, there’s a new mandatory column in the report — Blocked time (measured in the selected time unit). Learn more about the Cycle Time per Column Report.
6. Updates from Our Solutions Architecture Team
In 10.16, we’re happy to share that:
- We've released a new tool that lets you prepare cards for printing directly from an "Advanced Search" filter. With this tool, you can print your cards on paper or export them to PDF. You can print up to 12 cards on a single A4 sheet, but please consider the environment before printing. Check it out here.
Enjoy exploring Businessmap 10.16!