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Using Labels to tag and filter - for example with Initiatives
Using Labels to tag and filter - for example with Initiatives

How to use labels to tag and filter your initiatives

Chuen Seet avatar
Written by Chuen Seet
Updated over a week ago

Labels are an informal way for you to categorize your challenges, objectives, capabilities or initiatives so that you can apply a filter and see items that match your selected label.  A label is a free form text that can represent anything you choose.

In this article we will describe how to use labels in the context of an Initiative but the concept is applicable to challenges, objectives and capabilities too.

Here are two common uses of labels:

  1. Strategic Themes - Label each initiative to link them with your strategic theme.
    When developing your strategic roadmap, you may already have a strategic vision in place with defined strategic themes such as Revenue Growth, Operational Efficiency, Customer Care, Staff Retention and Compliance.  You can label each initiative that corresponds to these strategic themes.  You can then filter by each strategic theme label to see which initiatives will help achieve the strategic theme.  These labels can inform your naming of the roadmap theme in the Roadmap step.

  2. Functional Areas - Label each initiative to link them with a functional area.
    You could label each initiative according to the functional area (or department) name in which the initiative belongs to or have the greatest impact.  Examples of functional areas are Human Resources, Finance, IT, Operations, Sales etc.

Note, you can apply multiple labels to an initiative so you can tag an initiative with both a strategic theme and a functional name label.

Labels can be used as a filter criterion to either highlight or show the initiatives tagged with a selected label.  The most powerful use of this is in the Prioritize Initiative 2 x 2.  In the following example, we can see that when all the initiatives are shown on the 2 x 2, it can be rather difficult to work with because there are too many initiatives shown (see below).

When a filter is applied to show only the initiatives tagged with a label, such "Products and Automation", this reduces the clutter so that you can focus on just the initiatives associated with that label (as illustrated below).

Adding and removing labels

You can tag an initiative with one or more labels.

To add a label start by selecting an initiative and open the properties panel.  In the properties panel you will see a "Label(s)" field, in here you can type a label name and hit the enter or tab key.  In the image below, a label "Products & Automation" is added.

Note, to delete the label you can click the X next to the label.

Tips: When adding a new label, a list of all previously added labels are shown when you click on the drop down arrow.  You can select an existing label from this list to save you re-typing it.  The following image is a list shown after clicking the drop down arrow:

You can add multiple labels to an initiative as shown below.

Filtering and highlighting by labels in the Prioritize Initiative 2 x 2

As mentioned above, when prioritizing your initiatives on the 2 x 2, you may have too many initiatives on the canvas which makes it hard to see.  Labels can be used to categorize your initiatives.  A filter can be applied to see only the initiatives that match a given label.

Note, you can filter by more than one label. For example, "Products & Automation" AND "Cloud Services"

When filtering you can choose to show only the initiatives matching your label (default), or highlight the initiatives matching your label.

When choosing to only show the initiatives matching your label, the initiatives not matching your label are hidden.  If cost estimation and benefit values are shown, then these are shown as a sub-total only. 

When a filter is applied, you can select the "Show All" toggle to show the relative position of the other initiatives.

Filtering and highlighting in published documents

You can apply a label filter to the Initiatives & Actions, Prioritized Initiative 2x2, Initiative Summary Page, and Initiative Summary List documents.  Applying a label filter can help narrow the list of initiatives shown.  You may want to do this when sending a subset of your initiatives to a particular group of people or function for review.

The label filter is applied in the properties panel for your selected document, as shown below for the Initiatives & Actions document.

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