Completed and archived (using the Time frame field) initiatives still seem to 'maintain' their rank for reporting purposes and can cause confusion when creating new initiatives and trying to view initiatives by rank in a dashboard / external report.
For example, I have some initiative lists that look good in the Strategy tab and contain 10 or so items ordered by priority, but when I create a report and include the 'Initiative rank' field, instead of them being listed as 1 to 10 they are like 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17 and so on.
The current workaround I've found is to click-and-drag an initiative on the Strategy tab as if you are going to reposition it, but then just drop it back in the same spot. This will then update the rank attribute to align with what I'm looking at on the screen. It's not intuitive and a confusing behaviour overall.
We have added enhanced sorting and filtering options for goals and initiative details pages that should help in this area.
You can now filter by any data point connected to goals or initiatives
You can also sort your initiatives by Name, Rank, Status, or Timeframe
Additionally, we've made it possible to customize your goal and initiative cards and added support for expanded and collapsed views.
The sorting/filtering described above hasn't addressed this specific issue. We still have to work around the 'Rank' field being applied to completed/archived items.