Visualizing the weight and burden of tasks

February 10, 2011 posted by Bruce

One of the things we pride Stacks on is that it can quickly visualize the workload of a business. This could be in regard to a specific client, project, team, or individual. It's only a click or two to sort and see this information. From the beginning Stacks was built to make resource allocation easier. However, we don't think we've got it 100% right, yet.

As of now each task has a particular visual association, currently it looks like this:

It shows you how many tasks are due that day and how important they are. In addition, if you hover over a Stack item you will get a line of information about the task. This is a good start. However, it lacks one important factor that applies to all tasks — the weight of that task. In essence, is that task a large task that will take a lot of time to complete, or, is it a small task that can be done in just a few minutes? In the above example you don't really know. To get the weight of that task you have to read what it is and then estimate how much time you think it will take to complete. You might not even be the best qualified to estimate this, which means you're stuck tracking down the person who is.

In theory this could be solved by associating an exact time with all tasks. For instance, when creating a task you simply enter the amount of hours you think it will take. Solved! Except there's a problem. Visually representing time in a scanable fashion is tricky. Imagine the above chart with hour associations overlayed on it. The last thing we want to do is make workload visualization harder to understand. Second, it requires that the time amount always be reasonably accurate. This means each user has to take time to estimate how many hours a task will take. Last, the association of time becomes outdated quickly, as soon as the user works on a task it is now outdated until the user returns to re-calculate it. This is not a viable solution.

What we need is a way for tasks to be given a weight without slowing down the process of assignment or visualization. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate, it just has to give us a better picture of the workload. Is someone slammed with three big tasks in one day, or do they only have a few quick ones to complete? Just this basic amount of information could greatly enhance resource allocation.

Here's the plan. Instead of requiring time values for each task, we offer a few default values and the creator chooses which one is most applicable: quick, average, or long. As users work on each task they can open and update it in a few clicks. If the creator isn't sure of the weight they can use the default of average and let the user update it if needed.

Now it's true that these classifications aren't the most descriptive. In fact, they're rather generic. That's okay. The goal here is to provide more information without increasing annoyance. Sure, some companies will define quick, average, and long differently than others, this is to be expected. The definition of task-weight should be based on what a company usually deals with.

The point is people in a company, particularly project managers, need a better way to grasp how busy their resources are. This is one solution to help fix that problem.