The new Emails & Activities area and Dashboards have removed the “Add Items” button for connected boards recently and the chat support agent I spoke to said this has been removed. I’m hoping it could be brought back.
Our use case has multiple boards attached to a board depending on who should be involved with different parts of the projects, not because we are hiding info from our team, but to avoid information overload based on feedback. ie. Our Photo Editors only want information about a project related to the photography, they don’t care or need information about scheduling, billing, video editing, etc.
This caused certain teams that had to deal with more information than others, like our Project Managers and Customer Support Team who have access to almost everything for each project, a lot of boards (boards for different creative teams in the project, client CRM info, accounting info, etc), to get overwhelmed by the table view while also not liking to have to constantly move back and forth between boards when on a customer support call and potentially dealing with lag issues since our boards are quite large.
To solve this, on our Project Management Board (for example), we still use columns to connect to boards that all the different information is stored in, but we don’t use the mirror columns on the Main Board, instead using the Emails & Activities with the “Connected Boards” widget in the Item View so the PM’s can see all the information for one project in one place. This fixed the issues we had with confusion, load times, and gave the PMs an easy way to move between the other board info and the “Updates” areas inside a project, without having to have multiple tabs open.
We saw a vast improvement in speed of workflow, less mistakes made but putting info on the wrong row, and happier team members when we set this system up last year since we set this up after they requested a “dashboard” view of each project.
Here’s a sample with client information removed from a training video to show how we previously had this set up…
By removing the “Add Items” button, if an item isn’t connected on the Main Table, we have to move back to the Main Table and connect it there and then go back into the Item View to do whatever needs to be done there (update info on other boards, or check statuses). This slows down workflow and has the potential to have more mistakes made.
Here’s a screenshot of how it looks now…
This new update seems a bit like stepping backwards for us, but I’m sure everyone uses things differently. Is this something that could be brought back?