Managing a backlog one story at a time is fine when the project is small and the team is just getting started. But as soon as you have twenty, thirty, or fifty stories in play, individual edits become a bottleneck. Sprint planning sessions get slow. Backlog cleanups take too long. Reassigning work when someone goes on leave turns into a fifteen-minute task.
Bulk actions in Orvezo solve this. You can select multiple stories across any section of the backlog or board and perform a single action that applies to all of them at once. This guide covers what you can do with bulk actions, how to use them, and the scenarios where they save the most time.
How to select multiple stories
On both the Backlog page and the Board, each story card has a checkbox that appears when you hover over it. Clicking the checkbox selects that story. You can select as many stories as you want, across different sections or columns, and the selection persists as you scroll.
There is also a Select all button at the top of each column. Clicking Select all in a column selects every story in that column instantly. This is particularly useful when you want to move everything in the Parking Lot to the Backlog, or when you want to reassign every story in a sprint column to a different team member.
Once you have selected at least one story, a bulk action bar appears at the bottom of the screen showing how many stories are selected and the available actions. The bar stays visible as long as any stories are selected. To deselect everything, you can uncheck individual stories or click elsewhere to clear the selection.
What you can do with bulk actions
Orvezo supports the following bulk actions on selected stories.
Reassign lets you change the assignee for all selected stories in one step. You pick a team member from the workspace and the assignment updates across every selected story immediately. This is the action you reach for when someone leaves the team, when you are balancing workload before a sprint starts, or when a new team member joins and needs to be onboarded onto existing work.
Change sprint moves the selected stories to a different sprint. You can move stories from the backlog into a specific upcoming sprint, move stories between sprints, or remove stories from a sprint and return them to the backlog. This is the fastest way to restructure sprint scope during planning without dragging cards one by one.
Change priority updates the priority level for all selected stories. You can move a group of stories to High, Medium, Low, or Critical in one action. This is useful during backlog grooming when you are re-evaluating priorities after a shift in product direction and need to update a whole group of stories at once.
Move to changes the section placement of the selected stories. You can move stories from the Backlog to the Parking Lot, from the Parking Lot to the Backlog, or into a specific sprint. This is different from Change sprint in that Move to also covers moving stories to and from the Parking Lot, not just between sprints.
Assign epic lets you attach an epic to all selected stories at once. If you have just created a new epic and need to categorize a group of existing stories under it, this saves you from opening each story individually. Select the stories, assign the epic, and every selected story is now associated with it.
Remove epic does the opposite. It detaches the epic from all selected stories. This is useful when you are restructuring your epic hierarchy and need to unassign stories before reassigning them to a different epic.
Delete removes all selected stories permanently. This action is irreversible, so Orvezo asks for confirmation before deleting. Use this when cleaning up a backlog that has accumulated stories that are no longer relevant, duplicates, or ideas that were never going to be built.
Sprint planning cleanup
One of the highest-value uses of bulk actions is sprint planning. At the start of a planning session, you often need to move a set of backlog stories into the upcoming sprint. Rather than dragging them one by one or opening each story to change its sprint, you can select all the stories you want to commit, use Change sprint to assign them to the target sprint in one step, and move on.
At the end of a sprint, you often have carry-over stories that did not get done. Rather than deciding the fate of each story individually in a planning meeting, you can use filters to surface all the carry-over items, select them all, and use Change sprint to move them into the next sprint as a group. The planning conversation then focuses on whether the carry-over is acceptable, not on the mechanics of moving stories around.
Backlog grooming with bulk actions
Backlog grooming sessions are a natural fit for bulk actions. A well-run grooming session involves reviewing priorities, clearing out stale stories, re-epicing stories that have shifted workstreams, and parking work that is not ready for the queue.
Start by filtering the backlog by epic or tag to focus the session on one area at a time. Review the stories in that group. Select the ones that should be moved to the Parking Lot and use Move to in one action. Select the ones whose priority needs updating and use Change priority. Select the ones that belong to a new epic and use Assign epic. Work through the backlog in organized groups rather than story by story.
For stories that are simply dead weight, old ideas that were never going to ship, duplicates that accumulated over several sprints, or tickets that have been sitting untouched for months, select them and delete them. A clean backlog is a faster backlog. Every story that does not belong in the queue is friction the team has to navigate around during planning.
Reassigning work when team composition changes
When a team member goes on leave, changes their focus area, or leaves the team entirely, their assigned stories need to be redistributed. Without bulk actions, this means opening each story, changing the assignee, and saving. For a developer with fifteen assigned stories across two projects, that is a lot of repetitive clicks.
With bulk actions, the process is much faster. Filter the backlog and board by the departing team member's name using the Assignee filter. Select all the stories that appear. Use Reassign to move them to another team member. Repeat for each project if the person was working across multiple. The whole process takes a few minutes instead of the better part of an hour.
The same pattern works in reverse when a new team member joins. You can filter the backlog to show unassigned stories, select the ones you want to give them as a starting set, and bulk-assign all of them at once. This is a faster and more intentional way to onboard someone onto existing work than pointing them at the board and hoping they pick up the right things.
Using filters with bulk actions
Bulk actions become significantly more powerful when combined with filters. The backlog page and board both have filters for Tags, Assignee, Epic, Priority, Blocked, and Due state. Applying a filter narrows the visible stories before you select them, which means you can use Select all to quickly select every story that matches a particular set of criteria without manually identifying each one.
For example, if you want to move all Low-priority stories out of the current sprint and back to the backlog, filter the sprint column by Priority set to Low, click Select all on the sprint column, and use Move to to send them to the Backlog. The whole operation takes about ten seconds and leaves the sprint containing only the work that actually matters for this iteration.
Combining filters with Select all is the fastest way to perform large-scale changes across a project. Instead of making manual decisions about each story, you define the criteria for the group and act on the group as a whole. This is the difference between managing a backlog story by story and managing it as a system.