What is FlowFast

Welcome to FlowFast!

In this article you'll learn about our service and some key features it provides:

• What is FlowFast;

• Basic terms — company account, spaces, boards, cards;

• What sections there are in FlowFast;

• What modules are available on paid tariffs;

• The most popular functions in FlowFast, that help to make your work more convenient.

What is FlowFast

FlowFast is an online teamwork platform that allows you to manage projects and processes.

It helps to visualize the working processes, monitor tasks, see the stages of work, priorities, blockers, etc.

The main instrument to organize processes in FlowFast are Kanban-boards that reflect the phases of work and cards with tasks. Besides boards you can use documents, charts and reports that provide you with detailed information about the processes within spaces.

With the help of FlowFast you can:

• clearly depict the work plan for all the business processes;

• monitor the status of the tasks based on statuses, dates, staff members;

• distribute the load of your employees;

• build clear interaction within your team and outside contractors;

• maintain easy to understand records of your projects;

• keep all the data on your projects in one and the same place;

• create and simultaneously edit documentation .

Basic terms — company account, spaces, boards, cards

Here is the schematic representation of FlowFast structure:

You register a company account → Create spaces and add your colleagues to them → You create boards on your spaces → You fill up boards with cards.

Company account

You create a Company account while registering in FlowFast.

Every account in FlowFast has its own domain which is created while registering. It looks as follows: DOMAIN.flowfast.io

As soon as you create a company account you become its owner.

In your account you can:

• create spaces;

• invite other users for further collaboration (the users can only see those spaces, they have been invited to);

• choose the tariff (it is applied to all the users within your account).

Space

Space is the main and top-level entity in FlowFast. It's the place where the boards are located.

You can create an unlimited number of spaces within a company account. Besides, you can invite users to spaces to collaborate.

It's possible to choose different formats/visual representations on each space to make your work more convenient:

• Boards;

• Lists;

• Grid;

• Timeline;

• Calendar;

• Reports;

• Archive.

Grid format

Lists format

It's worth to pay attention to the Reports

FlowFast suggests 11 built-in reports and charts that you can use to achieve different aims.

You can see how fast the team works, learn about the reasons for blocking and delays, find out the needed amount of time to finish certain types of tasks. The analytics can help you make your work more productive and effective.

Board

Boards visualize the phases of the working process and show where each task is located. Boards are a place where you place cards with tasks.

Boards consist of:

• Columns that represent the phases of work;

• Lanes that help to prioritize tasks, differentiate them upon the types and responsible people.

  

The unique function of FlowFast is the ability to place several boards within one space at a time. Due to it, you can see the whole picture and don't need to switch between boards, as you can see all of them on your screen.

Additionally, you can place one and the same board on several spaces.

Card

Cards are the tasks that are placed on your boards. You can add all the required information including due dates, status, members and responsible members, links, files, task description, checklists, etc.

Besides, you can communicate with your team members inside the card by leaving comments.

What sections are there in FlowFast

You can find FlowFast sections on the left-side panel.

Dashboard

Here you can see all your cards, activity and the time you spent on tasks based on timer.

In the "Cards" tab you can see and sort your cards based on 3 criteria:

• space;

• status: queued, in progress, done;

• role in the card: owner, responsible or member.

In the "Activity" tab you can see all the actions you made in FlowFast: card movement, checklist items marking, appointing responsible members, etc.

In the "Timesheets" tab you can learn how much time you've spent on tasks during a week, a month, or a custom period of time. To see it you need to turn on a timer while working with cards.

Documents

Documents help to store all the necessary data in one place and edit the files together with your team.

Ways to use Documents:

• Storing working documents in one place;

• Creating notes, documents, instructions, texts, etc.;

• Knowledge base for your company;

• Publishing documents for external users.

Documents section is available to all company members except for guest users.

👉 To learn more please go to the Documents article

Administration

Administration is the panel where you can manage your company account and spaces.

By default it's available to the company account owner. The owner can grant access to different administrative sections to other users in the Members administrative section or in the Company settings one.

Add-ons on paid tariffs

We have a Free tariff in FlowFast that has most of the popular functions available. However, if you need more opportunities you can switch to a paid tariff and choose necessary add-ons to turn on more functions.

Scrum add-on

This add-on is aimed at scrum teams.

Allowed options:

• Built-in template of a basic scrum board (it includes the backlog and the sprint board);

• Ability to start sprint on a board;

• Burndown chart;

• Sprint velocity chart;

• Ability to add lanes to the board ;

• WIP limits;

• Warning about stale cards in the column.

Scrum board with an ongoing sprint

Kanban add-on

It's needed for those who work in Kanban methodology and provides a more diverse organization of boards. 

Allowed options:

• Adding subcolumns;

• Adding lanes;

• WIP limits;

• Warning about stale cards in the column;

• Cumulative flow diagram (CFD);

• Control chart;

• Spectral chart; 

• Block resolution time;

• Throughput.

Kanban board example

Service desk add-on

The aim of this add-on is to help organize work with the requests, coming from external users, who don't have access to your boards.

Users can create requests via the customer portal, email or Telegram-bot. You'll see the requests in your usual FlowFast environment.

👉 You can learn more in this guide Service desk

User Story Mapping add-on

This module helps to create USMs (user story maps)..

USM helps to see the big picture of the product, plan user stories, throw brainstorms, plan the composition of releases, versions and MVPs.

👉 You can learn more in this guide User Story Mapping

Time sheets add-on

It lets users record the time spent on tasks and allows managers see the load of employees. This module can help you better control the allocation of working time and plan deadlines

Allowed options:

• Timer in cards and spaces.

• Ability to see the records based on timers, sort them by users, tags, boards and other parameters in the Timesheets section.

• Ability to download the report in .xls

👉 This guide can help you to learn more Timesheets

Group management add-on 

If your company is big and you have a lot of spaces we recommend managing access rights via groups.

Allowed options:

• Ability to create groups of users;

• Ability to grant access to spaces and administrative sections to multiple users simultaneously;

• Ability to change access rights via adding to/removing from a group;

• SSO authorization. For example via Google Workspace (ex. G Suite), Microsoft AD (ADFS), SAML2.0 compatible server, LDAP.

Using groups helps to avoid situations when a user accidentally wasn't given access to a space, or was added somewhere by mistake, etc.  

Gantt and resource planning add-on

The module allows to distribute the working load of employees. You can make plan the amount of working hours that is needed to fulfill each task.

This information is reflected on a timescale. You can make certain people responsible for tasks and see their hourly load broken down into days.

Allowed options:

• Ability to plan tasks on a calendar grid and link the tasks;

• Ability to plan resources for the tasks;

• Ability to plan the workload of employees and see the working time time distribution for ech task;

• Ability to automatically count the workload.

Popular functions in FlowFast that can make your work more convenient

We do our best to add more features to help make your business processes better.

You can find out information about new releases in the What's new section (you can find it right in the interface).

It's a brief overview of FlowFast functions. Do you want to learn more?

👉 You can find answers to your questions in our Knowledge base.

👉 Besides you can refer to the Beginners Guide (see the screenshot above)

💡 Do you still have questions? You can reach out to our Support team → press the question mark in the top right corner → Ask a questions in chat. We'll be happy to assist 😊