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Planview Customer Success Center

Tasks vs. Connections

What’s the difference between tasks and connected cards?

Cards representing larger work items often need to be broken down into smaller components. In AgilePlace there are two methods for breaking down work, tasks and connections, and each has its own specific purpose.

Tasks are intended to be used as a sort of personal checklist for the assignee(s) of the card. These checklist items generally represent items that are delegated to the assignee(s) of the card they’re housed in. Tasks are not visible when looking at a AgilePlace board and they are not included in board analytics.

           

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Use tasks as a personal checklist for the assignee(s) of the card they're in.

           

Using tasks to track work that is important to the team or stakeholders can lead to hidden work or miscommunication. To avoid this we recommend using AgilePlace's connection feature.

While tasks are helpful for tracking small reminders for specific pieces of work, connections allow for more visibility and communication between teams. AgilePlace connections provide the ability to manage child cards on one or more team boards while also reflecting progress and potential risks on, and within, one or more parent cards.

           

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Use connections to allow for more visibility and communication between teams.

           

Connections benefit teams because each team member can easily manage their own work, along with the work of their entire team, all in one place. Connections benefit Stakeholders because they don’t have to manually gather status updates from specific assignees.  

Use Tasks when you need to:

Use Connections when you need to do one or more of the following:

  • Track a checklist of items required to complete work on a card
  • Stay organized about what communications need to be sent related to a card
  • Keep a list of requirements to validate for a card
  • Ensure your standard supporting tasks don't get forgotten
  • Break down larger work into smaller components
  • Manage and/or rollup information on smaller, related work items across multiple people or teams
  • Track the progress of smaller work components in board analytics (and still get rollup analytics of the larger effort)
  • Visualize the progress of blocking dependencies for a card

You can transition your tasks into connections at any time. Check out our article on transitioning tasks to connections