Launching task-based comments (and improved search)

We hope this finds our user community well and rejuvenated from summer breaks.

Here at Method Grid HQ, we certainly benefitted from a refreshed development team (even if their breaks largely involved family camping across a damp UK) … as they have returned to work with gusto!

No sooner were they back at their desks and a major release sprint to communicate: task comments (a paid/pro feature) and improved element searching.

Task comments

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that this powerful new feature was not even part of our originally communicated roadmap.

Rather, this is a great example of user community dialogue influencing our development prioritisation.

As soon as the solution included the ability to add tasks to elements (back in 2018!) it started to evolve into a really exciting new direction: essentially as a platform that – uniquely in our opinion – allows project/task management to be built on a foundation of structured knowledge resources.

Since then, tasks have become increasingly potent:

Tasks can be assigned to individual team members – see feature blog;
Tasks can be viewed in grid (project) level task logs for team checkpoint reviews – see feature blog;
Each team member can view and manage their tasks through their own, individual dashboards – see feature blog;
A due date can be scheduled – see feature blog;
You can dashboard filter your tasks (e.g. by status) and push them to your preferred calendar – see feature blog;
You can bulk-assign and bulk-schedule tasks (for managers of large, complex projects) – see feature blog;
You can set tasks to require file-evidence completion – see feature blog; and
You can set task reminders – see feature blog.

As these task features grew, so grew the myriad of use cases to which Method Grid is now applied and, along with this, many of you got in touch to ask for task-based commenting!

Such was the voiced demand for this, we pushed it right to the top of our development roadmap.

What do we mean by task commenting?

Simply: the ability to have an individual comment thread against a specific task (previously this was limited to comment threads at the element or grid level).

So now – with this release (in paid/pro mode) – you can communicate and collaborate on any individual task by clicking on the comment (speech bubble) button as the image below shows.

Click on the speech bubble by a task to open the comments area for that task

A comments thread on a task

Tasks with unread comments are indicated by a darkened comment button with red dot.

If a task has unread messages, the icon changes to a solid fill speech bubble with red dot

You can, further, @mention colleagues to ensure they are immediately alerted to the comment.

This will result in an in-app notification being sent immediately and an email notification (as set by each member’s personal preferences: sent immediately, part of daily summary or emails-off). See “Your settings” under your personal profile dropdown to adjust such preferences.

You can @mention colleagues to direct comments to them

As a reminder, such chat threads can also be linked to your wider corporate chat solution – Google Chat, Slack and Microsoft Teams – via grid-level webhook integrations.

Settings panel for setting up a webhook to push notifications to your preferred chat app

Comments improved generally

We have taken this opportunity to improve commenting generally across the solution. Now, at the task, element and grid levels, comments appear in a updated interface along with the ability for comments to be edited and deleted by the comment creator.

Editing a comment you have added to a thread

Edited comments are annotated with the “Edited” tag aside the comment date-time stamp (which always stays at the point of original creation).

Improved element searching

If that were not enough (we need to let our development team take more holidays!), we have also in this release improved the element starting point interface – with a new search engine.

This feature, relevant to grid builders, supports the build out of grids.

The element starting point button (viewable in edit mode) allows grid builders to expedite element creation by picking up from an element template – or – an existing element (essentially a copy/paste). Previously, the desired element then had to be selected from a dropdown list. For users with large grid/element libraries (as we well know!) this will have resulted in torturously long list scrolling.

Now you need scroll no more – as we have built a search facility into this feature to quickly down select to the appropriate item – as the animated image below illustrates.

Improved element search

Next up for our fast-moving development team?

Next up, we will be introducing enhancements to the Executive Dashboard (Stage 03):

Additional data filters
Full “Drill down” functionality – from portfolio grid view – to selected grid’s elements – to element’s tasks
Ability to update grid information in this view (e.g. status updates)
Dashboard views for “all tasks” and “all elements” at the account level

You can follow our development roadmap here (enabling structured knowledge + project/task management = repeatable professional service excellence).

Please continue to keep the feedback and new feature ideas coming (there is nothing we like more).

Is there a feature you would love to see us add to our development stack? If so, please let us know in the comments below or email [email protected]