Businessmap User Guide

In this guide:

1. Welcome to Businessmap
2. Businessmap User Roles and Privileges
3. Types of Workspaces
4. How to Manage Custom Dashboards?
5. The Kanban Concept
6. The Businessmap Workflows
    6.1. Initiatives and Cards Workflows
    6.2. Initiatives and Cards Dependencies (Links)
    6.3. Timeline Workflows
7. The Businessmap Board Features
8. Additional Dashboard Navigation
9. Managing Goals and OKRs
10. Additional Product Tips

1. Welcome to Businessmap

Businessmap is a platform for agile project management with which you break down your projects and visualize them into multiple levels of hierarchy.

Businessmap helps managers and team members to visualize their work processes and get things done quickly and efficiently. It enables all stakeholders to see the big picture and be aware of the overall work progress at all levels. The software is embedded with powerful analytics tools and business rules of automation to facilitate your everyday work with the system.

The purpose of this document is to show how Businessmap supports work at all levels in the organization. Before you start with Businessmap, it is recommended that your PM organizes training for the collaborating teams so that each member is introduced to the key Kanban principles.

The training must include a review of the boards in the account and the respective workflows. Once everyone is familiar with the process, they will be able to work and suggest changes that will move every team in a positive direction.

2. Businessmap User Roles and Privileges

The person who has registered the Businessmap account automatically becomes an Account Owner. The Account Owner has full permissions in the account and creates the initial account infrastructure: Workspaces, Boards, custom roles definition, and invites the first users that will collaborate in the system.

Every Businessmap user should be granted a Role: either default or custom. The default role allows regular users to create, move, block, and update cards; search and filter account data, create their own widgets, configure card view, board defaults, and notifications.
With the custom role, certain actions and permissions might be granted or restricted. 

The Workspace Manager status overrides any user role. The user granted this status has full permissions to manage Workspaces (respectively the belonging Boards) to which they are assigned.

Admin Privileges are system-level permissions that allow users to access and manage different account areas. For example, only when granted the respective privilege, a user can make payments in the account, invite users, or manage the system integration.

3. Types of Workspaces

The Home Dashboard is the entry point of your Businessmap account that provides centralized information and monitoring of all Workspaces and Boards in your account. 
Note that when you access your Businessmap account, you will see only the Workspaces and Boards that you are assigned to.

The Workspace: think of it as the folder that collects the Team Boards of a certain department in your organization. There are two types of Workspaces:

• Team Workspace (1) (the blue ribbon). It is designed for Teams. The folder collects the boards that visualize team workflows where team members collaborate.
• Management Workspace (2) (the green ribbon). It is designed for Managers and allows them to connect one or more team boards to a single Management Layout to easily track progress across multiple departments and projects.

Note: Only Account Owners and users with Create Workspaces privilege are allowed to create Workspaces.

Here is how to work with workspaces in action:

4. How to Manage Custom Dashboards?

Every Businessmap user can create their custom dashboards. The system allows you to create multiple custom dashboards inside Businessmap to meet the unique needs of your organization.

All custom Dashboards become available under the All workspaces (1). Every new Dashboard appears at the bottom of the list, but you can rearrange the order at your convenience.

Each dashboard can display a combination of:

• Workspaces — add workspaces, which are relevant to the Dashboard context.
• Widgets — add widgets including the Analytics charts, custom search reports, and Power BI reports to track critical business health metrics.
• Workspaces and widgets — combine Workspaces and Widgets in a logical group (e.g., a project workspace with the respective metrics).

You create a new Dashboard using the New Dashboard button (2).

The Favorite boards pane (3) located at the top of your Home Dashboard displays all boards in your account that were marked as Favorite (click the ♡ icon). When you mark a board as a favorite, it appears as such for you only (it doesn't show as a favorite for anyone else).

With the My Workspaces buttons (4), you can perform the following actions:

• Create a new workspace
• Show the Archived Workspaces and Boards panel

You can also use the Filter (5) to quickly access boards and workspaces.

5. The Kanban Concept

Every Kanban board has three main sections that show the state of your tasks in the flow:

1. Requested — this is the area where you place the work that you plan to work on next.
2. In Progress — when you start working on a particular task/card, you have to move it to this area.
3. Done — when the task is completed, you move it to Done.

Main elements:

• Kanban Card – This is the visual representation of tasks. Each card contains information about the task such as owner, deadline, description, size, priority, etc. There are many ways to create a card. You move cards to show their progress in the workflow.
• Kanban Columns – Each column on the board represents a different stage of your workflow. The cards go through the workflow until their full completion.
• Kanban Swimlanes – These are horizontal lanes you can use to separate different types of activities, teams, classes of service, and so on.
• Work-in-Progress Limits (WIP) – They restrict the maximum amount of tasks in the different stages of the workflow. Limiting WIP allows you to finish work items faster as you focus only on current tasks.

To learn even more about the Kanban concept and how to take advantage of it, please check the following Kanban guide. You can also learn how to organize sprints with Kanban here.

Kanban in Practice:
For more detailed mapping of your process, your PM can create as many subsections as you need to reflect your unique workflow. For example, a Development team may have a Kanban board that consists of multiple columns and swimlanes.

6. The Businessmap Workflows

Initiatives and Cards Workflows

By default, your board consists of two workflows: the Initiatives Workflow (1) and the Cards Workflow (2). The board can be set to display either workflow or both - it depends on the use case and the way a certain team is utilizing the board.

The Initiatives Workflow is the top swimlane on your board, designed for Senior team members/Project managers. The Initiatives Workflow is the place where Projects/Epics/Bigger tasks are visualized through automated Initiatives.

You know that breaking a large project down into smaller tasks helps team members identify the scope of their work and better understand what they need to work on. This is what Project Managers do with initiatives. They break them down into smaller, actionable items. Each individual step is represented as a card on the Cards workflow.

Smaller work items represent the who, what, and when part of your project. Each task is assigned to a team member and it provides details on the project's deliverables, such as the goals the project will achieve, requirements, deadlines, estimated budget, and cost, etc.

Initiatives and Cards Dependencies (Links)

Initiatives and cards are linked, and there is a parent/child dependency between them. Initiatives move completely automatically across the board when any of their child cards are moved to “In progress.” Once all of the child cards linked to an initiative move to “Done,” then the initiative is 100% completed and moves to the “Done” section too. To better understand the concept, please watch the short video below.

Timeline Workflows

Project Managers may prefer to visualize Projects in a calendar view. If so, they will enable the Timeline Workflow that runs horizontally across the top of your Board layout. This workflow shows the duration (start & end date), progress, and project delay of initiatives, as well as other key data.

You can learn more about Timeline workflows here.

Alternatively, you can use the Planning view of an Initiatives workflow to organize your projects.

TIP: By knowing how the Initiatives workflow works, we can have a better understanding of the Management Workspace. It contains all Initiatives workflows of selected boards so that managers have visibility of all initiatives that matter in their domain in a single view mode.

7. The Businessmap Board Features

The features located on the sidebar to the right of your board's interface help you to easily manage and track your work in Businessmap.

• (1) Create a work item — use the plus icon to create a new card or initiative. By default, the card/initiative will be created in the Requested column of the uppermost workflow of your board. If the first workflow is a timeline workflow, the initiative will be created in the Backlog. You can learn more about creating cards and initiatives here.
• (2) Card Tokens — there are two types of tokens: blockers and stickers, which are custom for your account. Use them to block cards or additionally mark them with a certain label for categorization. For more information, check the dedicated card tokens article.
• (3) Board Filter — with this feature, you can filter out cards that are relevant to your search and match certain criteria (for example: Priority = Critical). Read more about using the board filter here.
• (4) My Queue and Worklog — use this feature to quickly see at a glance all cards that are assigned to you, across all Workspaces and Boards. You can easily check the time you logged against tasks. Here is more about how to use the My Queue and Worklog feature.
• (5) Related Boards — this feature is designed for Project managers. It facilitates the work breakdown process. To learn more, check the dedicated article on related boards.
• (6) Board Background — make your board more stylish by adding an image or setting a color as a background of your board. You can learn more about configuring your board background here.
• (7) Import/Export cards — Project Managers can use this feature to quickly populate boards with cards using the Excel import functionality or when they need to export data.
• (8) Configure Card View — use this setting to personalize your card view and show/hide card properties that are visible in a closed card view. These view settings are configured individually.
• (9) Invite a new user — only users with "Account Owners" privileges can invite new users to the account.
• (10) Board Policies — the board policies panel provides information about the board's description, column/lane policies, as well as information on arrival/departure and business rules.
• (11) More options:
  • Calendar — the default calendar view is set to Deadline, which means that all of the deadlines from your workflow are highlighted in the Calendar integrated with Businessmap.
  • Board Settings — use it to apply default properties for the respective board.
  • Board Webhooks — use them if you need to integrate Businessmap with other systems.
  • Tags — use this menu to check what tags are available for the current board.
  • Types — use this menu to check what card types are available for the current board.
  • Templates — use the templates management menu to disable, enable, and add card templates to your board.
  • Custom Fields — use the custom fields management menu to disable, enable, and add custom fields to your board.
• (12) Card Zoom Switch — It allows you to toggle between four different levels of zoom for cards on the board.

8. Additional Dashboard Navigation

The Dashboard provides access to many other useful functionalities and control panels in the system.

• (1) Search field — If you are looking for a particular card in your account, enter a keyword in the Search Field. Click the Magnifying glass to open the powerful Advanced search panel and refine your search information to generate custom reports.
• (2) Account Administration — To invite new users, manage users' permissions, process automations, integrations, and your account security, go to the Account Administration.
• (3) Reporting tool — To quickly run reports and review data (e.g., generate a Throughput report), use the Reporting tool.
• (4) Help Center — When you need to quickly find information about the product, open the Help Center and visit our Knowledge Base or contact the Support team.
• (5) Notifications — Subscribe for in-app or email notifications from My Notifications to keep track of your team's activities and your own actions. Note that the notification settings are configured per board.
• (6) My Account — Visit My Account to manage your personal account data, get an API key, or access the Payment panel.

9. Managing Goals and OKRs

The Outcomes feature in Businessmap allows you to implement the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework and track your project goals.

You can also automate the process of tracking your goals' progress through our Outcome rules. To learn more about what they are and how to use them, please read our dedicated Outcome rules guide.

10. Additional Product Tips

• When working with cards, the Card context menu provides a shortcut to a lot of functionalities.
• If you want to get your colleague’s attention (a registered Businessmap user) on a specific topic or simply want to communicate via the card, you can use the “@” mention symbol.
• Not only can you create and update cards via email, but you can also collaborate with customers and track all replies in the comments section of a card. For information, please visit the following dedicated section.

If you need any additional help with the software, you can find more guides in our Knowledge base or get in touch with our support and customer success teams. 

To get more information about the Kanban concept, please visit our Kanban 101 library.