Overview
In this training on projects, we will review viewing project plans, viewing tasks assigned, and updating tasks in a project plan.
Transcript
So the goal is here to add cards to it. So, you know, we had a planning card, right? Or planning parent task. This could be a card for you or a testing card, right? This is where you do your UAT testing, UAT testing card. Maybe you have a deployment card, right? Maybe you have a card that's focused on resource management. Again, there could be all these different cards that you could create, you know as a project manager here, and assign those to your team members. Those are all the cards we're gonna create. But under Planning, let's go ahead and open that card, and once you open it, you basically have the same functionality as a Waterfall but more in a card format. You have the start and end date, priority, you can assign it to Serkan to complete, right? Or anybody else on the team, and Alexa, maybe. We've got the variety of options here. You can make different colors here of cards. Maybe signify a red for maybe important or higher priority items, right? So on so forth. Again, select Save as you're making these updates. You have a feed just like the project feed, to initiate comments here, communicate those to your team members. "Hey Charlene, you are in charge of this planning card." There, we're just making a little task here for her, Save. And then if you wanna record more of the detailed tasks similar to a Waterfall plan, you could say schedule, oh, sorry, schedule kickoff meeting. You could say hold kickoff meeting, and then you can also say, prior to that probably even, plan logistics for kickoff meeting, right? So you can certainly add these in here. The order really doesn't matter but you can adjust them as needed. The goal is here, let's say, you know, Charlene has plan the logistics. When she's done, check. Schedule the kickoff meeting check, right? As you can see, this little bar here will dynamically go up and give the card a percent complete. You'll also notice there's several other tabs such as the Work tab, allowing you to record your time, and Attachments tab, allowing to record attachments to a project, and then an Issues tab, allowing you to record issues as to this particular card. Now, once you're finished working on the actual card, you can certainly go back to the Card tab and exit out of here. But you'll notice the system already automatically made some adjustments in the background. Ultimately, the goal of a Card Wall plan is having all your cards listed here, under the new state or new swim lane, and move them over to a process when you start working on them, right? Once you're finished with updating all of these tasks, you should be going over here and marking them as Complete or dragging them over to the completed state. It's a very, very important concept. Do your lists have to be in this order? Not at all. You can change them, but this is where it naturally makes sense to go, from left to right. And then of course you can add additional lists. Please note, as you're adding additional lists, those cannot be deleted. Those can always be deactivated. Let's say I wanna work on the UAT, right? Instead of, you know, double clicking on the UAT card, I wanna go to the Resources tab and say, "Hey Serkan, you're responsible for UAT." Using more of this, you know, more of this agile approach to assigning users to these task and their names abbreviated by the first and last name will be down here at the bottom. You also might wanna, you know, delete a card, right? You'll notice there is not a deletion card. If you wanna delete a card, you need to mark it archived first. Selecting the Archive button, confirm, you know, you no longer need that task. Go to the stack sandwich icon over here, Show Archive Cards. They'll display this red hidden menu, and now if there's anything, I can either drag it outside the archives or I can say, "I no longer need this. Please delete this card or the entire archive." So you've got a nice little bit of a functionality here, in terms of managing these archive cards. The common question we often get asked is what's the difference between a Waterfall versus Card Wall? Please go ahead and select this in the stack sandwich icon and it'll give you a detailed listing in this KB article Card Wall on Waterfall, and when to use which. The differences are highlighted here. So ultimately the Card Wall plan features are that you have start/end dates, which are optional, where in a Waterfall plan you must have a start and end date. You can do real-time updates by dragging things left and right, right? Drag and drop feature is pretty common there. You've got a subtask checklist. You can color code the different tasks. However, I look at the Waterfall plan, it's definitely a little bit more for those traditional project managers of you there's a check and checkout. You can have milestones, you can shift tasks. Tasks, end and start dates are required. You can have dependencies, you can even have external dependencies to different projects inside of team dynamics. You can have parent/child tasks, you can export the plans, and you can do so much more, right? So if you follow more the traditional approach, you would definitely use the Waterfall plan. Now, it's pretty common though in the project management world, or especially using team dynamics, to have a combination of multiple plans. You might create a Waterfall plan, which is a traditional plan for more of your executives, right? They wanna see very, very high level plan with some big milestones, start and end, et cetera, and then you might create a Card Wall plan for your technicians or your team members working on the project, 'cause usually developers or technicians like the Agile drag and drop principle where they can mark things complete as needed, so on so forth, so it does definitely not hurt to have a combination of both, or just one plan. I've also worked with clients in the past where we've created a phase one as one plan and then we've added multiple other versions or phases, just down below. Completely up to you how you wanna manage these, but you know, definitely have at least one single plan with every project, even if it's just a handful of tasks. The last feature I would like to explore with you on the Project/Workspaces tab is the Managed tab, one more time. One of the primary duties as a project manager, besides, you know, of course creating a project, is maybe to deactivate the project, apply a project template, apply a baseline, add resources from here, copy or close your project. These are some powerful features. Feel free to explore them offline and specifically you know, apply a project template is really nice where you can not only template out the project plan, but your Briefcase repository can be templated out with all your project charter documents, right? So that every project manager is successful, all of the issues can be standardized, all of your links can be standardized, so on so forth. The other though, duty of a project manager is to update their project periodically by the Update button. So every two weeks, or I prefer actually every week if it's an active projects, to go in here and say, "This project is currently in process." What is the project health? We are doing pretty good, so it's in Project Green, right? In the health, you don't have to use the health but it's an optional feature here. Anything yellow, obviously you might need. "If we don't watch out, this might, project might derail", and red usually means it's probably derailed or maybe we've lost a bunch of resources. Whichever you select, I select green, and then I usually copy the percent complete from my project plan, and say 5% complete, project kickoff took place 3-1-2021, right? As part of next steps, we will start working on administrative configurations. Again, you know, whatever you would like to put in here, I also use this section here or this comments field to put in my meeting minutes. Then you get to notify, right? Anytime I do a project update, actually, either you notify all folks that are part of this project by selecting that blue heads icon or you know, exit icon, if you just wanna notify Alexa here. You can notify other people, so other people from our organization such as Miles, maybe I wanna let Miles know about this particular project, right? Then you can also of course notify other people. Let's say you've got Serkan, right? Serkan is not a client user, but he's an external vendor. So you can certainly type in my email address here and send notifications. Apart from that, the update button gives you also an opportunity to update all of your custom fields as they're on the form. Do you have to go in here to update it or you don't? But it's certainly a capability and then all you have to do is select Save, project will be updated. You'll notice it's now in process, right? We changed the status and your latest and greatest project status update will be performed here at the bottom. and this will bring us to all the activities related to a project.