Why project management and overview
Welcome. Effective project management is crucial for any business as it helps you to stay organized, meet deadlines, and achieve your goals. A good project management application is a real powerhouse that will allow you to manage your team's workload via projects and tasks, simplify team collaboration, and allow for time tracking and reporting. In this course we will show you how our powerful app can transform your project workflow. That sounds amazing because here at the Dinosaur Museum we're just getting started to work on our biggest project yet, an authentic fossil exhibition. Wow, that sounds interesting. All right, let me show you how our project application can make your life easier. So in this first tutorial we will set up your project and handle our first task together.
Creating a new project
So here we are in our database. We'll go right into the Project module and we can see our existing projects, but we're going to go ahead and create a new one for the upcoming fossil exhibition. And here we have a couple of options to set up. We can decide that we want to time track the time spent on tasks. We can also mark our project as billable, but because this is more of an internal project we will not do that. So we'll just go ahead and create our project and right away we are taken into the Kanban view. Okay, what view? So Kanban is one of the several ways to organize and view your project. It's essentially a whiteboard that allows you to create kind of Post-it style cards for each one of your tasks. The board is divided into stages that you then use to track the progress of your tasks with a simple drag and drop.
Setting up Kanban stages
So let's create our stages. We can see examples here if we wanted to, but I will just create my own stages. We will say: Ideas — ideas for when we're brainstorming what to do in the task. Then we will have Assigned, which is for when we have assigned a specific person to start working on the task. We'll have Ongoing when the bulk of the work is being done, and at the end we will have Review. Let's add it. And now we can go ahead and start working on our first task.
Creating and assigning your first task
Well that's nice. Now could you show me how to handle a task from start to finish please? Of course. Let's go ahead and open our first task. So we will click on New right here, and we are prompted to fill in the task title. So we know that we will need to find a consultant because we will need to find a paleontologist who will help us review the fossils that we have purchased for the exhibition. And we also have a possibility to assign it to a person. We will actually do it right away. We will assign it to our colleague Dina and our task is ready. We are immediately prompted to create another one, but let's just go ahead and start working on this one. So normally we have our task a little bit longer in the Ideas stage before it's assigned to a person. Now we already assigned it to Dina and let's say she started working on it already, so we'll put it in Ongoing.
Quick actions and task details
Before we head into the specific task, I just want to show you that there's actually a couple of things that we can do from the Kanban view without even opening the task. We could, for example, mark it as high priority. We could schedule an activity directly from here if we wanted to. We could assign more people. We could even color code the task, that could help a little bit. Let's say we'll put it in purple. And we could do some more things, but for now let's go ahead and open the task. So we have some more things that we can do here. We could really customize our task by putting in a description. What I like to do is put in a checklist just for the person working on the task to really know a little bit how to structure their work. So maybe: select top three consultant, call them, ask for rates, so we know how much they charge for a consultancy. We could add tags from here as well, so let's say that this task is urgent, for example, just so we can see it immediately when you look at Kanban. We could allocate some time, so we could say that a task like this from start to finish normally would take maybe about six working hours. We could also select a deadline, so let's say that normally by the end of next week we should be done with the work. And what we can also do is schedule our first activity. So this is quite handy when we structure our work as well, so we know that we will have to call someone and our first person to call will be Professor Digs, who's a very famous paleontology mastermind. So we're really hoping that we'll get to work with him. Let's schedule the task.
Handling responses, status updates, and finishing tasks
Now let's say that our colleague Dina actually called the professor and he maybe offered a rate that's a little bit too high, so we will have to either rework our proposal a little bit or maybe see if we can offer a little bit of a higher rate. But before we move forward with the rest of the task we will actually keep it a little bit longer in the Ongoing Kanban stage. Because we want this to be clear and visible for everyone that looks at the task, we could actually say that this task has some changes requested. So we will update the task status from here. Let me go back to the Kanban view and show you what it looks like from here. So here we immediately see that something changed. We see that we have the little exclamation icon on the task and also the status bar here is in yellow, so we can see that there's one task in the changes requested task status. Now once we have called the professor and we talked to him a little bit more again and he agreed to go forward with working with us, we would put this task as approved. And since actually this is all that we had to do in the task, we can move it to the next Kanban stage which is Review. This is just for us internally to see what went well, what went wrong, maybe how we can improve our workflow a little bit in the future. And again once the task is in Review we could update its status a little bit to changes requested or approved, but since it's our last Kanban stage we will just mark this task as done. Let me go into the task and do it from here. Mark the task as done. Once we have done this and if we go back to the Kanban view we actually see that the task is grayed out now because it's not active anymore; it has been archived, but we can still see it. Since we finished our work and the task is in review, we are actually done with the entire workflow. One more thing that we could do is decide that this whole Review Kanban stage is not that important; we don't actually need to see at all times the tasks that are in it. So you could decide that we want to fold it and then we will only see the tasks that we're actually doing the bulk of the work in. This is just a little trick to keep a clear overview when you're looking at your Kanban view. Hopefully this gave you a little bit of an idea on how to handle your tasks from start to finish. That is it for this tutorial and we will see you for the next one. Thank you so much for watching.
