How to use Github Projects to streamline your workflows, reduce manual reporting, and eliminate hassle

[nikhil-thampi]

Bridging multiple platforms is an everyday challenge for many project and product managers. The engineers are in Github for version control and code management, the issue tracking and sprints live in Jira, the planning, reporting and docs are floating around in Confluence and it falls to the product and project managers to stitch all of these together and keep them consistent and up-to-date. The work is tedious, time-consuming, and error prone.

This is why here at Github all our project planning happens within our own project management tool: Github Projects. Today I’d like to walk you through some of the core features we use everyday and give you some tips on how to get the most out of them. This is the first part of a three part series.

Some key highlights:

• Automated Kanban Boards: Automatically update task statuses as changes are made in the codebase - such as when issues are closed, reassigned, or updated.
• Filters, labels, and nested task lists and issues make it easy to drill down and look at projects in the ways most relevant way.
• ​​Cross Repository Management: Manage dependencies and track issues across multiple repositories from a single dashboard, simplifying the oversight of projects that span several codebases.
• Integrated Issue Tracking: Link directly from code commits to issues, ensuring that all project information is interconnected and easily accessible.
• Milestone Tracking: Set and track progress towards milestones and tasks lists directly within GitHub, providing a clear view of project timelines and deliverables.
• Customizable Workflows: Tailor your project management workflows to fit your team’s specific needs, allowing for flexibility while maintaining structure.
• Unified Reporting: Generate comprehensive reports from a single source, eliminating the need to compile data from multiple platforms and reducing the risk of errors.

Top 10 Features of GitHub Projects

Kanban Boards:

Easily organize work with Kanban-style boards, where you can categorize tasks under multiple buckets.

Roadmaps:

Roadmap functionality makes it seamless to visualize long-term planning.

Milestones:

Track milestones like Beta and GA release easily using GitHub projects to see the progress of larger initiatives, across multiple issues and pull requests.

Issue and Pull Request Integration:

GitHub Projects are connected to GitHub Issues and Pull Requests, thereby allowing easy management of multiple tasks using single view.

Task Automation:

Task automation feature of GitHub projects helps in automatic management of issues and pull requests between columns based on different actions, like opening or closing of issues and pull requests. This eliminates the need of manual supervision and associated overhead of efforts.

Classification using Labels:

GitHub Projects allows you to assign tasks to specific team members and categorize them using labels. This feature is useful for identifying task priority, type, or who is responsible for each piece of work.

Filters and Views:

Filter helps to easily segregate tasks based on labels, assignees, milestones, or other criteria and these filters can be easily saved to the Project views.

Task Lists and Nested Issues:

Complex list of tasks can be easily managed using task lists and nested issues. This helps to understand the dependency between multiple tasks in the GitHub projects.

These complex tasks can be tracked using “Tracks” and “Tracked by” fields to show the relationship between various issues.

Custom Fields:

The tool allows you to create custom fields based on your unique project management requirements.

Insights and Reporting:

The insights and reporting features of GitHub projects provide valuable additional perceptions about the project progress and other key metrics.

Conclusion

GitHub Projects is a powerful, flexible project management tool designed to meet the needs of developers and teams. Its seamless integration with GitHub platform makes it an excellent choice for both individual developers and large teams alike. Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing an enterprise-level software development team, GitHub Projects can keep your workflow organized, transparent, and efficient.

What's Next?

One of the major criteria for selecting a project management tool is the visualization options a tool can provide. In the next part of this series, we will discuss in detail how GitHub Projects can solve some of your project visualization challenges.