So I’ve been strangely silent on the planning board as of late. I wanted to hold off on my ground-breaking, revolutionary and epic blog post on all that is the planning board until I had a chance to see what you guys were doing with it.

So how are our customers using the planning board? Probably in more ways than I can easily fit into a book let alone a humble blog post but let me put some generalizations out there just to give you an idea.

First we have the planners, these are the guys who jump into the planning board when they need to work on many items all at once and make certain that the work they are managing in OnTime is evenly distributed. More often than not these guys are Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners or Team Leads. Planners open up the planning board, group by user to and use the group headers to make certain that their team all has a good amount of work assigned to them so that nobody is caught with nothing to do, then they’ll quickly switch gears to make certain that their entire unplanned backlog isn’t high-priority work. Planners love the planning board in OnTime because it makes it easy to work with many items quickly, organize them into groups and quickly visualize what's going on.

Other OnTime users use the planning board for their meetings, because of the way we designed it, the planning board is very handy for Scrum meetings, planning meetings or just getting together with your dev team to hash out what your time estimates should look like. Since the planning board is easily filtered and uses a color coded and easy to read “Card” analogy it looks great in a group environment and lets you make changes to a project or specific work as quickly as the conversation moves.

We’ve also seen users accessing the planning board just to make a quick update to all of their items in one place; these are usually developers who work on many items all at the same time. They’ll log into OnTime, launch the planning board and quickly move the items they touched that day to the next workflow step or add a couple worklogs to the things on their plate then get right back to doing what they do best (which is the actual work of making your own great software or designing an awesome product for your customers).

The interesting thing (from my perspective anyways) was that some people actually started doing EVERYTHING in the planning board, literally the planning board completely replaced the UI in OnTime for these folks. We knew the planning board was pretty revolutionary when we made it but we’ve found that for many of our customers that we literally changed the way that project management is done.

One last thing that I want to mention, the planning board isn’t just for Windows Users, it runs just as well in your browser regardless of what platform you’re on. Not related to the point of this post, I just think that it's pretty cool.