If you look after a single project in Redmine, the world is manageable. As soon as there are five, the waiting begins. Loading takes time and a hard load limit (usually 500 issues) stops your search to answers, where things are currently stuck.
Yet the Taskboard of the Reporting Plugin can do exactly that: show all projects at the same time.
The board knows not only projects, but also what lies between them
Most people know the board view from within a project. But it works just as well in the cross-project issue list - the view you reach via the main menu and that shows all issues you have access to.
This changes what a board actually is. Within a project it answers the question “How is this project doing?”. Across projects it answers the question “Where does my area stand?” - and that is a different league.
Grouping by project: the portfolio view
The interesting part begins with grouping. If you select project as the grouping, every project gets its own continuous row across all status columns.
What you see is not a list, but a pattern:
- In which project are most issues stuck in “Review”?
- Which project has nothing in progress although it should be running?
- Where is work piling up that was still flowing three weeks ago?
No issue list answers these questions, no matter how well you filter. They are visual.
And because the board uses the same drag and drop logic as in the project view, you can also drag a card into another project row - the issue then changes its project. Practical for issues that ended up in the wrong project, without having to open them individually.
Grouping by person: the workload view
The second grouping that only really makes sense across projects is assignee.
Within a project this shows you who is working on what in that project. Across projects you see something nobody else shows you: the actual total workload of a person.
This is the classic blind spot in project work. Every project manager sees their own project and thinks a colleague has three open issues. In reality they have three in your project, four in the next one and five in the one after that. Only the view across all projects makes it visible that nobody is working too slowly - they are simply overbooked.
Large numbers of issues are not a deal breaker
The most common reason why teams do not even try cross-project boards: the worry that such a view becomes unusable with a few thousand issues. With many board solutions that worry is justified: either they simply load everything at once, or they draw a hard line and stop displaying anything beyond a certain number - often 500 entries.
The Taskboard takes a different approach. It initially loads only a defined number of issues per column and fetches the rest while you scroll. The same applies to the swimlanes: if the board is grouped, further groups are loaded automatically as well. There is no hard limit and no “load more” button - you simply keep scrolling.
In practice this means: the view across all projects builds up without noticeable waiting time even with very large numbers of issues. So exactly where a board delivers the most value - many projects, many people involved and correspondingly many issues - it does not become unusable.
There is also a small detail that matters more in everyday work than you would expect: The board scrolls as a single unit, with the member bar and the status headers staying visible at the top. So even after 200 cards you still know which column you are in.
What you should set up for this
The view lives on a saved query. Once set up, it is one click away for you and your team:
- Open the cross-project issue list via the main menu
- Set your filters - typically “status = open”, possibly narrowed down to the projects of your area
- Switch to Board under Options at Display results as
- At Group results by select either project or assignee
- Save the query, give it a meaningful name and share it with your team
Two saved views side by side have proven themselves: one grouped by project for the weekly look at the portfolio, one grouped by person for the question of who currently has too much on their plate.
One limitation you should be aware of: Grouping by category is available across projects, but drag & drop then only changes the status, not the category. The reason is Redmine itself - categories are defined per project, so moving them across projects would not be unambiguous.
Who benefits from this
Not everyone. If you look after one project, you are better off with the project view, because it contains less noise.
The cross-project view becomes interesting in three situations:
- Team leads with several projects - the weekly look at where things are stuck
- Support and internal service teams - issues come from many projects, but the team is the same
- Resource planning - the question of who has how much open across all projects
In all three cases a single board replaces a series of individual queries. And unlike a report that somebody has to compile, it is always up to date.
All information about our extensions for Redmine can be found on the product page. The Reporting Plugin is subject to a fee and is available separately or as part of our Business-Class Bundle as well as the Enterprise+ Bundle. The function described here can be tested extensively in our online demo.