Marking project task completion by verse

Question

One of our projects was recently migrated to PT8. When I mark chapter tasks complete in the “Assignments and Progress” window, I’ve found that shift-click works to mark a range of chapters, as in PT7, but alt-shift doesn’t bring up the chapter details where we could mark the verses completed in PT7. We often stop work at the end of a pericope, not necessarily at the end of a chapter, so we began using that feature in PT7 to help us keep track of how far into a chapter we had accomplished a given task, especially tasks like reading a draft with members of the community in contexts where we can’t really plan to finish a whole chapter at a time. Is there a way to mark tasks by verse in PT8?

Answer 1

@BruceBeatham, @KimB,

I’m sorry that this has made things more difficult for your projects. The decision to drop verse-level progress tracking was made when we moved from PT7 to PT8 because it makes a lot of things more complicated, and it seemed that not enough people needed this feature to make it worth the complexity.

We have quite a spectrum to cover, from teams that want to just use Stages Table to track progress in large brushstrokes, to teams like yours that find even the by-chapter granularity to be too limiting.

One workaround you could try is to track progress by chapter (or book) whenever possible, and use an inserted note as a bookmark whenever you need to leave a chapter in a partially finished state.

P.S. Regarding granularity, we recently improved support for by-chapter tasks, allowing the first task in a stage to be a by-chapter task that depends directly on the preceding (by-chapter) task–i.e. the last task int he previous stage. This means, for example, that chapters 1-5 could be ready to start Stage 2, while chapters 6ff in the same book are not because they have not yet completed all tasks for Stage 1.

Comments

Thanks for your quick answers. I should have written in to check on this forum before spending time trying to find a progress-marking solution at the verse level in PT8.

I can appreciate how complicated it must be to develop a product for people who work in such a wide range of ways. I didn’t expect that features would be removed in the upgrade, but it isn’t the first time that I’ve found that I’ve been trying to use a tool in a way that it wasn’t intended. It seems that the Project Plan features of PT are intended mostly for managers and others who need progress reports for funders, etc. We had just begun using those features in PT7 for a few months within our small translation team because it was nice to quickly see which verse we had last worked on across the different books and stages in the status report.

It’s disappointing that we can’t track progress at the verse level anymore in PT8, but not something that we had yet grown to depend on. We used the note approach (that anon468618 mentions above) before we tried the Project Plan in PT7. To reproduce the comprehensive status report, I’ll probably make a custom note category for “Current Progress” that I can search for across all books in a notes window. Or go back to our spreadsheet chart, or add a field in a Trello table; something simple. I don’t know how much it will be worth for us to go through all the work of defining the scopes, dependencies, effort-level, etc of all the tasks in the project plan if we’re not using it to track our day-to-day work, though.

If the development team considers the level of granularity again at some point in the future, consider this a vote for verse-level tracking. Thanks for your good work.

Answer 2

Nope, sorry, that functionality was removed in 8.0.

Comments

I had been wondering about this too. The ability to mark tasks completed at the verse level is pretty important to translation projects. If a translation team can not use "Assignments and Progress" to track progress in "real time", the team must also keep a separate log of which verses were completed on a given day, or at the weekly team meeting. This is counter-productive and sort of defeats the purpose of this otherwise great progress tool.

Answer 3

@BruceBeatham,

Well, the Project Plan and progress tracking features are intended to be of benefit to teams on a day to day basis. That’s not to say that our first non-beta release of those features (in PT 8.0) already succeeds at doing what all teams want it to do–just that it IS aimed to benefit teams directly: to (a) help them with their own progress tracking, and (b) eliminate much of the tedium from reporting back to managers/funders.

We’ll definitely keep your feedback in mind!
Jon

CC: @IanH @anon451647

Comments

We also have a team that used this feature in PT7 und would be very happy to have it back in PT8.

Greetings,
anon719148

Answer 4

I know this is an old thread, but wanted to add that I just learned that several of our teams have workflows that would benefit from verse-level task completion if it were available. Based on this thread, it looks like there are currently no plans to implement progress tracking at that level. Is that still the case?

chris
Pioneer Bible Translators

Answer 5

There are no near-future plans to implement verse-level progress tracking, sorry.