Put Some Teeth in Your SharePoint Task List

As Director of Online Operations here at Bamboo, one of the tools I use to keep my team on track and in sync with the rest of the company, is an ordinary SharePoint task list.  We review this list every Monday morning with representatives from other teams across the company.  We make updates to this list throughout the week reflecting our progress against key projects and ongoing activities.  Anyone looking for the current status of a particular project can check in and see what's going on.

I recently made a minor change to this list, using a new Bamboo product, that completely changed the way I look at this list.  I believe this small change will significantly improve the frequency of updates to the list, and maybe even result in some increased productivity.  Here's some background on what I did:

My task list is a very standard list of "projects", and includes the following columns:  Project Name, Status, Assigned To, Priority, Due Date, Percentage Complete & Notes.

Overall this list has been an effective exhibit.  In our weekly meetings, we simply read through the tasks in order, report progress and discuss any issues or challenges.  Once tasks are marked as complete, they disappear off the default list view and are effectively "archived".

In terms of editing and updating the list, there isn't a whole lot to do.  Project Name, Assigned To, Priority and Due Date rarely change.  And honestly, it just hasn't been that useful to update the Notes field very often.  If a project is complex enough that notes to fellow team members would be helpful, these are usually sent in email or captured on a related wiki or discussion board.

So in terms of weekly updates, the most useful field is actually Percentage Complete.  I thought that my team was doing a reasonable job of keeping this field updated, but I found out I was wrong.  I made this discovery by adding a Bamboo Visual Indicator to my task list.  Visual Indicator is a hidden gem of the relatively new Bamboo Custom Column Pack. There are two main categories of Visual Indicators, essentially "color coding" and a "thermometer" style progress bar.  The latter is what I added to my task list, and here's the result:

Once applied, it was instantly obvious that most of the values in the Percentage Complete field hadn't been updated in a long time, a flaw totally obscured by the previous list of numeric values.  The new display also put a bright spotlight on the long list of tasks that genuinely hadn't been started at all.  There's nothing like effective data visualization to make a tired data old data set suddenly seem urgent and relevant again.

With the enhanced visibility of this data point, you can bet that this column will now be updated before every weekly status meeting.  You can also imagine how much harder it will be to hide the fact that some projects just get stuck or bogged down.  Bamboo Visual Indicator will be a component of any project management application I ever build in SharePoint. 

So, download a 15-day free trial of Bamboo Custom Column Pack, and add some teeth to your SharePoint Task list.  Custom Column Pack has a bunch of other killer features for dressing up any SharePoint list column, including a replacement text editor with spell check and in-line picture uploading, and two "selector" controls that simplify and control data entry.  If you create or maintain SharePoint lists as part of your daily life, you will deeply appreciate all the functionality these products have to offer.