Working with Outsourcing, Externals, and Clients Using Favro Custom Fields
By: Jon Leslie
Tags: Development, Outsourcing, Collaboration, Marketing, Agile

Working with Outsourcing, Externals, and Clients Using Favro Custom Fields

External development and outsourcing are realities for most businesses. Whether it’s external marketing, software development, localization or quality assurance, the secret to success is to make them feel like an extension to the internal teams. You’re collaborating with them in real-time instead of throwing things back and forth over a wall. While this is the ideal, it can be challenging to achieve. Internal teams want to be working in the same app with external teams, but some information should only be seen by internal team members and hidden from external team members. Favro’s new Custom Fields make this possible.

Outsourced Creative Agency

Let’s take the example of a marketing team working on a product release campaign. They’ve partnered with an outsourced creative agency to help with campaign asset creation. The internal marketing team has a budget for each asset that they don’t want to share with the external creative agency. When creating the custom field, which done directly on the card pop-up, they select Visible in.. -> Specific collections. By default, the new Internal Budget field will only be visible in the current collection.

Internal Budgets are entered for each asset in the marketing team’s backlog (list). When these assets are added to the creative agency’s workboard, which is visible in both the internal marketing team’s collection and the external creative agency team’s collection, the external team will see the asset card with all relevant information and can start working on it, but they can’t see the Internal Budget. This is because even though it’s the same board and the same cards, the teams have access to them from two different collections.

Internal Budget is visible to the internal marketing team

Internal Budget is not visible to the external creative agency

External Software Development

Internal software development teams also often work with external developers as an extension of the team. In this example, the team’s Product Owner is reviewing feature development done by an external development team. This feedback can be seen by the internal team, including an external development manager, who passes on more technically specific feedback to the external development team via a different custom field. The PO Feedback custom field can only be seen internally, while the XD Manager Feedback field can be seen by both the internal and external teams.

Both Product Owner and External Development Manager feedback is visible in internal team collection

Only External Development Manager feedback is visible to the external team

When adding fields to their card pop-ups, the external team will not see PO Feedback in the list of available fields. Even if they searched for the custom PO Feedback field they would not have access to it.

Pin Custom Fields to Boards and Backlogs

As well as limiting visibility to specific collections, Pin to… allows for a finer level of granularity in regards to what fields are shown on cards on different boards and backlogs (lists) in a collection. Back to the marketing team example, they might want to always see Internal Budget on the backlog cards but not on the workboard cards, even if they’re the same cards. For the Internal Budget field, they simply select Pin to… -> Marketing Backlog. Custom fields can also be pinned to collections and even the entire organization to ensure they’re always displayed on card pop-ups.

Internal Budget shown in the backlog but not on the workboard with Pin to…

In summary, Visible in… controls who can / cannot see custom fields based on the collection and Pin to… controls whether or not custom fields are always shown on the cards based on boards, lists, collections or entire organizations. By using both of these options, you can achieve the perfect level of information visibility to both internal and external teams.

This video provides a step by step walkthrough of how to configure custom fields for outsourcing, externals, and clients in Favro.