Visual Task Board swimlane field limitations

[Gareth Davies]

The new VTB swimlane functionality is great, however there are some frustrating limitations. This is today's frustration...

I work in Problem Management, amongst other things we manage a portfolio of problem records we have deemed "Of interest". We don't own the records but they're generally the big ticket items so we want to monitor/shepherd them through to resolution.

We have over 1000 assignment groups and probably 50-70 tracked items at any moment in time, those are identified by a tag. As that number of assignment groups as an unorganised blob would just be a mess we have a multi-level hierarchy of groups terminating at 7 top level groups which align to the various company divisions.

Each of those divisions has a problem management rep assigned to it and they'd be responsible for monitoring the progress of the problem records.

With the new Visual Task Boards I can show the due date (i.e. expected fix date) so we can see how we're doing and when we can expect them to be resolved. I can also label them easily and filter by labels simply. At a glance I can see all of one person's problems, what the status of them is (vertical lane is problem state), sorted by related incident count, and any labels applied (red/amber/green). This makes it easy to work through them as a team update and discuss next steps where required.

So far, so good. However, I can assign the horizontal swimlane field to Assignment Group but what I actually need is Assignment Group.Parent.Parent.Parent. Assignment Group gives me maybe 30 swimlanes which is unmanageable. There's nothing in there that can't be accomplished with a report but it's simply nasty and clunky compared to the VTB view.

Is there any way get the horizontal swimlane to use the parent group rather than assigned group? I can pretty much do all that with reports too, but it's just nasty compared to a VTB.

[Jace Benson]

Have you asked on HI.  VTB is pretty much uneditable (blackbox) last I checked.