In the first part of this series, we talked about the strategies and things to consider before implementing Enhanced Filtering. In part 2, we are going to cover the best practices and technical considerations for implementing Enhanced Filtering.
I think a little history lesson is important here. In the classic filtering model you would create a ‘board filter’ that combined a project filter and a task filter. For example, you could create a filter that showed you all projects owned by a particular user, and only show the tasks in the holding list status. However, this classic filtering model did not provide much flexibility for making the filters dynamic. Unless you went back in to edit that filter, you would always see projects owned by that specific user and tasks in that specific list status. This meant that every user who wanted to utilize similar filtering criteria would need their own version of that filter.
That isn’t as fun as the ability to slice and dice into your data in order to see what’s most important to you. The biggest change with the new Enhanced Filtering is that you are now working with dynamic filters and have more options for viewing project data. In the above example, instead of having a static filter with those specific criteria, you now have the ability to use a flex filter (more on these in a minute) to filter on the Owner field as well as the task list field. You can now choose the owner and task list status on the fly. Here is that in action:
Ok, time to get into the weeds. There are a few elements to Enhanced Filtering that I will be talking about: board filters, flex filter sets, and project filters.
Let’s start with board filters. Board filters are the large, distinct buckets of projects, like ‘All Projects’, ‘Projects I Own’, ‘My Projects’, or even ‘Template Projects’. Think of these board filters as the base of a larger set of projects that you can then dynamically filter as needed.There are many board filters that TaskRay gives out of the box, but you are able to create your own if necessary. Here is how you can do that:
Now that we are comfortable with board filters, let’s move on to flex filter sets. Flex filter sets are the things that will allow you to drill further into a board filter than the above stated broad, distinct bucket. For example, I can choose the ‘Projects I Own’ board filter. This will show me yep, you guessed it, only the projects I own. But it will show me every project I own.
Let’s say I only want to see the projects I own related to a specific account. If I add the account field from the project to my flex filter set, I will now be able to see that option in my TaskRay sidebar. Using that field, I can search for and designate a specific account to further filter the broad list of projects that I own. Now I will only see projects that I own that are related to that account. Here is what that looks like:
That’s pretty cool, right? But why would we change flex filters? The standard flex filter we give you out of the box has certain project and task fields to filter, but those fields aren’t always important to every organization. Creating and assigning a new flex filter to users will allow them to filter their projects by the fields that help them complete their work more efficiently. So, how do we change our flex filters? Let me show you:
As you can see, flex filter sets give you the flexibility to filter on exactly what you want. Something that is worth mentioning is the ability to assign different board filters and flex filter sets to different users or groups of users. This is great for organizations that have different teams with different priorities and requirements. For example, if you have an onboarding team and a CSM team both in TaskRay, maybe the onboarding team wants to be able to filter their projects by dates and hours, and CSM’s want to filter projects by their customer tier, or ARR.
The last piece I want to talk about is project filters. These are a little different as they are not something you will see within the All Work tab. Project filters are accessed in the Portfolio view in the Performance tab. Project filters allow you to pull in projects that fit certain criteria into the portfolio view. This is how you would get there:
I, as an onboarding specialist myself, love the portfolio view because of the high-level details I can see. I love that I can drill into specific projects, given my needs at the time, and use Project filters to accomplish that.
I hope this blog post was insightful and will help as you look to implement this great new feature of TaskRay and as always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to support@taskray.com. If you need additional resources we have more support articles in our TaskRay Guide detailing Enhanced Filtering.
