Many tasks consist of several sequential phases, but creating a subtask for every phase clutters large projects. This is especially problematic in technical-documentation projects involving hundreds of documents.
Custom workflows can represent the current phase, but they do not provide a clear progress indicator showing how much of the overall process has been completed. They also do not adequately support different participants in different phases.
Request:
Add an optional task phases feature that allows users to divide one task into configurable sequential parts without creating separate subtasks.
For example, a technical-documentation task could contain these phases:
- Drafting
- Draft review
- Draft changes
- Formal review and signatures
- Approved
The task would typically have one owner or author. Additional participants could be assigned only to the phases where their involvement is required.
For example:
- The author is responsible for drafting and implementing changes.
- Multiple contributors are assigned as reviewers only for the draft-review phase.
- Reviewers receive an assignment or notification when that phase starts.
- The author receives the task back when review feedback is ready for implementation.
- Formal approval remains managed in the electronic Quality Management System, where applicable.
Each phase could have:
- its own name and completion status
- one or more phase-specific participants
- an optional due date
- a simple checklist or completion criteria
- sequential or parallel progression
- an optional weight for progress calculation
The parent task would display overall progress based on completed phases. For example, completing two of five equally weighted phases would show 40% progress.
Reusable phase templates would make this practical for recurring processes such as document development, design reviews, testing, procurement, and release preparation.
Why it matters:
This would provide meaningful progress tracking and phase-specific responsibility without generating hundreds or thousands of administrative subtasks.
It would also prevent reviewers from being assigned to the entire task when they are only responsible for one review phase. Project views and Gantt charts would remain readable while still showing where each deliverable is within its lifecycle.
This feature would complement custom workflows. The workflow would describe the task’s current state, while task phases would show progress and responsibility across the internal steps required to complete it.
