Hello there,
I am trying to build a tasks-board which uses both “normal” items and subitems at the same time. The goal is to use the status column for To Do/Working On It/Stuck and Peoples Column to define who is in charge of the item.
Now this works great when only using normal items, but if I want to use subitems too (since sometimes some tasks are more complex and therefore needs a more detailed separation) it gets messy. Let me show you why:
I want to see the progress of my team at one glance, so I used the “show summary on parent item” function for the people and status column of my subitems. This leads to now having two peoples and two status columns at the parent level. One pair for reflecting the subitems (which are not needed for items without subitems) and one for normal items (which are not needed for item if subitems are present). Now for Items with Subtasks the Person and Status column of the parent item are useless and even confusing.
I tried solving this by only using the “show summary on parent item” columns and using an automation: creating a subitem when an item is created. This leads to the parent summary columns be populated and editable just like normal items while also being able to expand into subitems. So far so good, even though I now have lots of placeholder subitems for a functionality, which Id rather wish Monday would implement natively.
But now I want to use the “My Work” section of Monday. Since the tasks board is now purely based on subitems I select to only show the subitem columns of this board in the overview. The big problem is that I have now a lot of items that just read “Automatic Placeholder Subitem” since thats what the subitem is named when automatically generated. So I do not know what the Item is about unless I click on the small “subitems icon” next to it in order to see what the parent item is called. If I have say ten of those Items lets say under “Today”, then I have to click on all the small subitems icons to get an idea and at the end of it when I want to decide what I want to actually start working on I already forgot what the first Item was about.
This is not a good user experience. I tried to find out how I can tell that “create subitem when Item is created”-automation to create the subitem dynamically with the name of the parent item but this apparently does not work either. See this post: when-automation-creates-subitem-include-parent-item-name-in-subitem-name
Are there any update on this? Or are there any ideas on how to solve this?
So here are two main problems involved here:
- Mixed Item/Subitem Boards need workarounds instead of working natively
- My workaround renders much needed “My Work” almost useless
Splitting the board is not an option since it just doesn’t make sense to have two boards which have the exact same purpose just to seperate slightly more complex tasks from “quick” ones.