What Is a Management Workspace and How to Use Management Boards? – Businessmap Knowledge Base

In this article:

1. Introduction to Management Workspaces
2. What Problems Does the Management Workspace Solve?
2.1 Visibility across multiple teams
2.2 Work breakdown and delegation
2.3 Scale Kanban across the organization
3. How to Create a Management Workspace?
4. An Overview of the Management Workspace
5. Management Board Planning View

1. Introduction to Management Workspaces

Most project management and collaboration tools are focused mainly on the team and very few provide proper instruments for managers too. At Businessmap, we value both the team and the manager. That is why we are making a huge step in the development of the software — introducing a brand-new concept called “The Management Workspace.”

The Management Workspace capability is designed to support the work of Project Managers, Product Owners, Delivery Managers, and C-level managers.

2. What Problems Does the Management Workspace Solve?

Visibility across multiple teams

Keeping everything in place requires the manager's attention across several boards, which adds a lot of distraction. The Management Workspace provides a way to distribute and track work across multiple teams from a single place called the "Management Board."

Think of this board as a master board that sits on top of multiple other boards, making it easy to see the big picture and allocate work where and when necessary. It's a novel concept and hence there's a learning curve but once figured out, it's extremely powerful.

Each management board has two sections:

The top section represents the work we want to manage in the management board. Depending on the context, each card in the management board can represent an entire project or product. In the case of large projects/products, a card can visualize a project component or a product version.
The Linked Workflows section displays the Initiatives Workflows of the boards that have been connected to the management board. The initiatives in the "Linked Workflows" section are visualized exactly as you see them when you open the connected board.

Work breakdown and delegation

The Management Workspace provides useful UI controls for breaking down work across two or more hierarchical levels. If you are the manager of multiple teams, you can use this feature to allocate work to all your teams from a central place - your management board.

With the drag-and-drop action, you can break down each Management Initiative into as many child Initiatives as needed. As soon as the child initiatives have been created, the teams can break them down into tasks and start working on them. The status will be reflected automatically across the work hierarchy.

Scale Kanban across the organization

The Management Workspace supports the practical implementation of a management system that can follow your work hierarchy as well as the org chart of the company. If that is your preferred way of doing things, you can connect some management boards as children boards of other management boards. You can do this to reach even the CEO level, which is exactly the example we provide below.

In the suggested implementation, the management board of the CEO connects to the management boards of the Marketing, Development, and Customer Success Management VPs. This is not a one-way visualization, but an interactive solution for work breakdown and delegation.

The CEO can create new Initiatives right into the boards of the senior management team and connect those initiatives to his/her own strategic goals. In turn, the VPs can do the same with their subordinates.

The cycle continues until actionable tasks are present on one or more team boards. The real beauty of this approach comes when the teams actually start working on day-to-day tasks. When the first task anywhere on a team board is pulled to in progress, the entire chain up in the hierarchy is moved to In Progress automatically, providing unmatched transparency across the whole company.

3. How to Create a Management Workspace?

To create a new Management Workspace, go to the dashboard of your account and click on the plus button from the three-button menu.

Step 1: Click Create Workspace and select the "Management Workspace" option.

Step 2: Give your Workspace a name (1) and create a Management Board (2) by typing a name.

Step 3: Use the dropdown to select one or more existing team Boards from your account. If there is more than one timeline or portfolio initiative workflow in a board, you will have to specify which workflow to add from a dropdown.

The system will instantly connect them with your Management Board and their Initiatives workflows will show up inside it.

The Management Workspace gets created on your Dashboard. Its color is green, while the Team Workspace is blue.

4. Overview of the Management Board

As we mentioned above, the top section of the board contains the work we want to manage at that management level (1). These could be entire projects, products, or smaller pieces of work such as project components, product versions, or even individual features.

The Linked Workflows (2) section contains all Initiatives Workflows of the team or management boards selected during the setup. The name of each board is displayed on the top left side and all its Initiatives are visualized in the standard Kanban view.

Only Workspace Managers can add linked boards from the Linked Workflows panel (3) in management boards.

5. Management Board Planning View

In management boards, you can access a board-wide planning view via the board sidebar. This view enables you to plan, oversee, and manage work across all linked workflows from one centralized planning view.

The key difference between the management board planning view and the workflow-level planning view is that, in the management board view, initiatives are organized by workflow for easier navigation and tracking. You can then further sort initiatives by initiative, column, swimlane, or parent.

For a complete guide on the planning view capabilities, please refer to our planning view guide.

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