We are very excited to show you the new things we’ve worked on in the past month in Planbox. We focused on 2 things:
- With some of your recommendations in mind, we made the sorting and filtering of items even better, and some other tweaks so that you can work even faster with your items.
- We wanted to help you increase your accuracy in baseline planning with the new Iteration Baseline Tile.
Let us know what you think. Will you be using these new additions?
Improvements on the Items Board
The Actions dropdown menu has moved upwards. Have no fear, it’s still there! Moreover, you can now directly create items from Zendesk (optional feature) from this menu.
The Item Sorting Bar (ie, the column headers) is now permanently displayed at the top of your items! (If you don’t want it permanently there, you can hide it by going to the Actions menu.) We also added the Priority column (#) on the left side of your items; it’ll now be easier for you to see the priority of each item.
As previously, when you’re clicking around to sort items, that view is only local and temporary. Your team members will not see the changes unless you change the new priority for everyone in the team. Note that now, when a sort is active, items won’t be movable by drag and drop.
As for the filters, with the improved functionality, items can now be filtered even more specifically. This improvement makes the use of roles for tasks (optional feature) very relevant. For example, when a task is meant for a specific role but has not been assigned to anyone yet, applying the Role-Filter and the People Filter to Not-Assigned will allow anyone with that role to pick up the unassigned task.
Lastly, you can now just directly drag and drop files into individual Item Panes. You don’t even have to open up that File tab anymore!
What is the new Iteration Baseline Tile?
The Iteration Baseline Tile will show you items that have been added or changed since the iteration has been baselined. You will be able to compare the hours originally estimated for each item to the newly updated amounts. Ultimately, you get an overview of the work that was added since the iteration was originally planned, and if more resources will be needed.
To identify the modified items or the newly added ones in your list of items, look for the full brown triangles or the empty brown triangles at the corner of your items:
- Full Brown Triangle: newly added items
- Empty Brown Triangle (brown corner ribbon): items with modified estimated time
If the planning of your iteration suddenly changes a lot, you can choose to reset the baseline. By doing so, all newly added items and items with modified estimated hours will become part of the original items. In essence, it will be as if you were just starting your iteration and have planned everything before.
The Iteration Baseline tile is an optional feature. To activate this new feature, you need to go to your Initiative Settings and look in the Features section.
Future additions expected for the Iteration Baseline Tile: a section for items that have been removed from the iteration.
What’s next?
To give you a sneak preview, we’re working on making search within Planbox even more powerful.
Remember, we always love hearing from you. Planbox is what it is today because of all of you! So if you’d love a new feature or have a question, show that Feedback tile some looooove! Or… give us a call! 
Tags: agile project Management, Agile project management tool, baseline, baseline planning, estimated hours, iteration planification, iteration planning, planbox
Nice! Being able to see the “manual” priority at all times is huge and removes a lot of confusion. As do the full-time column headers for sorting, and I really like the new add/modified vs baseline; it was always hard to tell the difference when that happened.
I also really like the new quick-pick filters! Makes it easy to see the cardinality of what’s going on and very easy to switch views.
Overall lots of great workflow improvements!
Thank you for all the great feedback, Alan! Glad that all the improvements we made is helpful for you