Hello there to all my friends out there in the community! My name is Cameron and I am a Product Manager at GUIDEcx. We recently held a Hackathon in early October where members of our engineering teams were able to work on projects of their choosing and were able to experiment around ideas they have had for improving our product. One of the ideas that was worked on was Bulk Actions for our newly improved Project table.
Typically a hackathon project is designed to paint the vision of what something could be and if valuable enough we work to allocate roadmap capacity to see the dream realized and have a feature that we can share with users. With our latest hackathon we gave the team a bit more time so they could push themselves to accomplish a bit more and I am pleased to announce that we have a working version of Bulk Actions available for GUIDEcx users! This is a still a beta feature and thus has to be enabled within the Labs section of GUIDEcx. It is really rewarding to have a feature that wasn’t slated on the roadmap for anytime within the next six months be in the hands of users and get value from it immediately. We have two bulk actions that are available right now: Bulk Delete and Bulk Reassign.
The Bulk Delete allows you to select multiple projects from the Project page and soft delete them directly from that page. This saves you from having to click into each project and then going through the additional clicks and load times of deleting them individually.
The Bulk Reassign enables not only the ability to bulk reassign the projects from one project manager to another, but also to reassign tasks. This is a huge time saver and introduces a new workflow that I am very excited about.
So now that you know a little bit about the benefits of these tools, let me tell you about a few of the quirks we have. As I mentioned, this wasn’t anything that was on the roadmap and we know that it needs some polish, but our thought process was “Let’s give users access to these tools now because they work and they can get value from it rather than waiting for weeks or months for us to polish it before releasing.” There are two friction points you should be aware of right now:
- After you enable the feature in Labs, individual users (Admin and Manager license types are the ones with Bulk Action permissions) will have to go the the Projects page, go to the Columns button, and then toggle on “All Columns” in order for the UI to update and display the checkboxes on the rows as you hover over them. This is a one time thing that the user needs to do and we are working to find a better option before doing a wide release.
- After you take an action of reassigning or deleting, you will need to refresh your screen to see it applied. There isn’t an auto refresh at this point. If you are deleting or reassigning a large amount of projects it will take a bit for all of the processing to happen. The other day I deleted 93 projects and as I would refresh again and again, I saw the project count go from 93 to 54 to 19 to 0.
Apologies about the length of the post, but I am just really excited for these new features and I want users to be successful with them. Our team is also really excited to continue to leverage our Labs feature. As a reminder, items within Labs are in a beta state and are subject to adjustments or bug fixes. So even though I know there are some things that need a bit of polish, I would love to hear from you about what you like and what you would change. I would also be interested in hearing what other types of bulk actions we could add to make it more robust. The next one on my list that we couldn’t complete during the hackathon was to have bulk administration of tags. Not sure where that ranks on your list, but please share your insight and feedback.