Key ideas in five minutes

Workflow uses a small set of words. On these pages and on some screens they show in purple and in quotation marks: select one to read what it means. Here they are together, in the order you meet them. For all of them in one list, A to Z, see the Glossary.

A department writes how a kind of work runs. That plan is a template.

• “department”
  A team that runs its own work in Workflow, with its own templates, projects and people.
• “kind of work”
  A type of work, such as a property tax appeal. It says if the work belongs to a property, to an engagement, or to neither.
• “template”
  A plan for one kind of work, from start to finish: its stages, its tasks and its rules. A department writes it once and starts many projects from it.
• “version”
  One saved copy of a template. You can change a draft. A published version never changes, and work starts from it. A retired version is not offered for new work.
• “stage”
  A named point that work moves through, such as Intake or Review. Each task is at one stage at a time.
• “ending”
  A stage where work finishes. When work gets there, the person picks an outcome.
• “outcome”
  How work finished, such as Filed or Withdrawn. The template gives the choices.
• “transition”
  A move from one stage to another that the template permits, with the people who may make it.
• “task”
  One job for a person to do, such as gathering the income statements. A project has many tasks.

The stages of one template, in order:

• “field”
  A value that a project records, such as a yes or no answer, a date or an amount.
• “condition”
  A test on a value. A task with a condition applies only when the test passes. Until then it is not applicable.
• “dependency”
  Something a task waits for: another task, a document, an outside party, an approval or a date.

A task whose condition fails is Not applicable. Read Why a task is “Not applicable”.

• “project”
  One piece of work started from a published template, often for one property or one engagement.
• “group”
  A set of one department’s projects that you follow together on one board.

Every task also has a state: Active, Done, Skipped, Not applicable or Removed. See Task states.

My Tasks and a group's board sort tasks into five columns. The template decides which column a task is in at each stage.

• Backlog
  Parked: not to start yet, while the task is at this stage.
• Up next
  Next in line to start.
• Doing
  Being worked on. This is where the work happens.
• In review
  Waiting with a reviewer, off the doer’s active list.
• Closed
  Finished as far as this task goes, at this stage.