The production board and production dates are fantastic tools to help you to manage your workload, keep your task list organised, and have an easy overview of the upcoming weeks and months.
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What is the production board?
Historically, to see the progress of any ongoing jobs across your site, you had to access your All jobs list, which displays key information about your jobs separated into columns. The production board allows you a more visual and interactive way of viewing your workload.
To access the production board go to your Work menu and click All jobs. Once you are on All jobs list, click the List drop-down and select Board.
If you cannot see the List option, go to Settings > General Settings > Extras and ensure that the "production dates" feature is turned on.
Your jobs list will switch to the production board view:
Each card in the production board represents one job, and will display the job name, production date, client name, the icons of any assignees, as well as the job status and the option to star or flag the job. If the job has a filing date key date, this will also display on the job card.
Using the production board
The production board gives you a quick, visual overview of your workload. You can see very clearly when you are most busy, and when you have some space in your calendar, allowing you to distribute your work more efficiently.
Filtering the production board
Similarly to the All jobs list, the production board comes with a set of filters to help you to narrow down your job view to a specific job, task assignee, account manager, type of a client, and status. Additionally, you can add custom filter options by going to Settings > General settings > Jobs list > Add field.
For example: you could have a production board filtered to display all your VAT jobs for the next few months:
Once you filter your list, you can save it for quick and easy access, for whenever you need to use it again in the future.
To save the filtered view, go to the Custom view drop-down and click Save view as...
Senta will store your list in the Work menu, for the next time you want to access it.
Managing your workload with the production board
The production board is not only a great tool to have an overview of your workload, but also a useful tool to manage your jobs.
You can drag and drop jobs from one week or month to another to spread out your workload.
Dragging and dropping a job can also change when the tasks for that job will become ready.
Production dates
Production dates are a new concept in Senta, which allow for more flexibility in planning your work. The production date is the date when you will be completing the work for a job, and is separate from the job date or any key dates.
The production date is set at the service level, and influences where on the production board your job will appear when it kicks off. As you drag jobs across the production board to a new week or month, the production date for the job will be updated.
Any date offsets for tasks are now set relative to the production date, so as you move jobs across the board their task status may change from ready to pending, and they will disappear from the Your tasks list.
Setting a production date for your jobs
You can predetermine how the production date is set for each of your services by going to Settings > Services and then click on a service. Scroll down to the job where you want to select the production date.
You will see that as a default, the production dates are set to be the same as the job date.
You can change this to be "unscheduled", which means that the job will go straight into the unscheduled column on the production board, or to be "job created", which means that the job will be added to the week/month when the job was created.
How will changing the production date affect the tasks within the job?
By default, any task date offsets are set relative to the production date. For example, if a task has a start date offset of +5d, it will become ready 5 days after the production date.
If you have a job with a production date of 16th December, and drag it to the next week so the production date changes to 23rd December, that task will change from having a start date of 21st December to instead starting on 28th December.
Task date offsets can also be set relative to a key date e.g. filingdate-7d. When you move jobs around the board, the start/due date of this task will not change.
You can also still set task date offsets relative to the job date e.g. job.date+3d. When you move jobs around the board, the start/due date of this task will not change.
Please note: if you set the production date of a job to be "unscheduled", the tasks in that job will stay pending until you move this job out of the unscheduled list on your production board.
Viewing the production date for any job
You can check the production date of any job from the jobs summary.
