Creating and Organizing Boards

Overview

A board is the top-level container for a set of work in StretchProjects. This guide covers creating boards, how they are automatically set up with stages, how naming works, and how to keep multiple boards organized as your work grows.

Create a board

1. Click Boards in the left rail to open the board index.
2. Click New board (or the create control in the toolbar).
3. Enter a Title — this is the only thing you need. Choose something an outsider would understand, like "Q3 Marketing Site" or "Client Onboarding – Acme."
4. Save. The board is created and opens with a standard set of delivery stages already in place.

When a board is created, StretchProjects automatically provisions its stages so you can start adding work immediately — you do not build columns by hand. New workspace project boards arrive with five stages: Backlog, Planned, In Progress, Review, and Released.

What happens behind the scenes

• The board is stored under your organization so only your team can see it.
• A URL-safe board key is generated from the title (for example, "Q3 Marketing Site" becomes q3-marketing-site). If that key is already taken, a numeric suffix is added (q3-marketing-site-2).
• The standard columns are attached in order.
• The board's visibility is set to workspace so it belongs to the client-facing surface.

Naming and duplicate protection

StretchProjects protects you from accidentally creating two boards with the same name. If you create a board whose title matches one you already have (ignoring capitalization and extra spaces), StretchProjects reuses the existing board and makes sure it has the full set of standard stages, rather than making a confusing duplicate.

Tip: Because titles are matched loosely, "Q3 Marketing Site" and "q3 marketing site" are treated as the same board. If you truly want two boards, give them distinct names (add the client, quarter, or workstream).

Organize multiple boards

As you add boards, keep them scannable:

1. Open Boards to see every board in a table with its title and description, key, visibility, item count, and owner.
2. Sort or scan by item count to spot boards that have grown too large.
3. Use the Dashboard — the Recent boards and Newly created boards panels, plus the Items by board chart — to see which boards are active.

One board per initiative

The cleanest pattern is one board per initiative or client engagement, not one giant board for everything. Smaller, focused boards make the dashboard charts meaningful and keep each stage column readable.

Set a description and owner

Give each board a one-line description of its purpose and an owner who is accountable for it. Both show in the Boards table and make hand-offs painless.

Example

An agency runs three client engagements. They create three boards — "Acme – Website Rebuild," "Bolt – SEO Program," and "Internal – Ops Improvements" — each with the standard five stages. On the Boards table they can see at a glance that Acme has 14 items and Bolt has 6, and the Items by board dashboard chart confirms Acme is the busiest engagement this week.

Tips

• Name boards for a reader who has never seen your work — include the client or workstream.
• Don't try to rename around the duplicate check; if you meant to reuse a board, StretchProjects already did the right thing.
• Keep boards focused; when a board's item count climbs past what fits comfortably on screen, consider splitting by workstream.
• The master Roadmap board is the broadest planning surface; use dedicated project boards for individual initiatives.

Troubleshooting

I created a board but it looks like an existing one.
That's the duplicate-title protection. A board with a matching name already existed, so StretchProjects reused it and ensured it has all standard stages. Give the new board a distinct title if you truly need a separate one.

My new board has no columns.
Standard stages are provisioned automatically on creation. If columns don't appear, reopen the board or click Refresh to re-pull it from the server; the provisioning runs on open as a safeguard.

I can't see a board a teammate created.
Boards are scoped to your organization. If you and your teammate are in the same organization you'll both see it; if not, the board belongs to a different tenant and is intentionally hidden.