The Workspace
Summary: 
Advanced: Concepts
Concept: An Overview of the Workspace With All Panels Open
(Note: As of this writing, this is the full scope of the current workspace. We will certainly add a few additional panels in future releases.
)
Concept: A Little Background on the Workspace
We designed the Workspace with forward-looking requirements:
- A drag-and-drop, “Touch” User Interface that could be used on large touch-screens in a collaborative environment.
- But that data was protected from accidental changes by errant fingertips.
- That didn’t require the user to retain context between ‘windows’.
- Constantly displayed counts.
- That was constantly updated in real time so that users feel ‘connected’ and can ‘sense’ progress – like feeling the organization’s heartbeat – and intuiting rather than necessarily reading reports about it.
- Allowed us gracefully obscure financial information if it was unnecessary for the organization, or the employee.
- That worked for all collaborative processes we could imagine.
- That could scale up in complexity for power users, and scale down to simplicity for entry level staff.
- That could let managers and leaders and teams perform their work the way they want to, but that the interface was consistent across the organization for staff, no matter what task that they work on.
Concept: The Panels are Organized into Blocks
The
Workspace
is grouped into related
Blocks
of
Panels
, outlined in Blue above. These blocks are:
- Organization: Your organizational tree.
- Program: the programs you have permission to see.
- Qualifications: program independent filters.
- Tasks: a list of the many types of tasks, and task detail.
- Schedule: Schedule and Reschedule panels, and the period panel for selecting their date ranges.
- Reports: reports available in the workspace.
That’s because:
- The Organization contains all the Programs.
- The Programs contain the Projects, Nouns, Verbs, Tags, Teams, and Tasks.
- Priority, Points (Estimate), Skills and Types are qualifiers (measurements) and they apply to all Tasks across all projects and programs at all times.
- The Schedule, Reschedule and Reports Panels are dependent upon the date rage supplied by the Period Panel.
Note: You might notice one inconsistency: the Teams panel is placed in the Qualifications block. Why? Because we were unsure whether to allow users to configure panel arrangements. Yet this location was best for most user tasks. As of this writing we have decided to include moveable panels in a future release. Tip: If you’re used to working with spreadsheets, using the Workspace is a bit like using a spreadsheet: just as the spreadsheet generally calculates from left to right, the workspace generally Filters from left to right. That’s why we are a bit careful about letting you rearrange columns. (Although in the future we will probably add the ability).