Project Manager Today (Video)

Transcript

Today we're gonna be talking about the project> manager's role in how they would use Workamajig. So when projects come into the system, they typically come through two different manners. One would be if our sales folks had managed an opportunity and then converted that opportunity into a full fledged live project, then the project manager would take that and start managing those projects. Another way would be as a project manager, I might be creating projects straight away. And if I'm going to just go ahead and create a brand new project for a current client, I can simple select my little plus sign, which will guide me to the very simple steps of how to create this new project. So choosing initially who this project is for and then giving the project a name, which is free form so the name can be really simple. We do recommend as a best practice to copy from project templates to create your projects and just know that the system does come loaded with a variety of project templates ready and waiting for you. But during the implementation training process, we would also teach you how to create your own templates as well as how to edit any of the current ones in the database. So certainly you want to make sure that you can document your own practices and use your own verbiage and always be able to update those as new types of projects come about. So with just a couple quick fields, I can create that new project. And as you can see right here, that then has created a full project set up. a unique project number identifier has automatically been assigned. There are a variety of numbering formulas that you can choose from in Workamajig, for this automated process. Because of the template selection that I made, this project also came with a standard working schedule for this type of project that's now completely open for me to make adjustments based on what's unique about this project. I can have schedules in Workamajig that are very scalable. So while the one I have in front of me is more of a phase and step type philosophy, I can also have very simple project schedules that might just have a couple quick bucket tasks, which is great for a quick turnaround projects, certainly It's very common to do a schedule that's similar to what I have, but you can also go multiple levels in. So it is a very scalable scheduling practice in Workamajig. Again, all of these can be edited, so if there's any changes you need to make to any of these tasks along the way, you're more than welcome to do so because obviously you need to make the project fit the schedule and the schedule fit the project. We do also recommend as a best practice if you know what types of resources you typically use to facilitate these tasks along the way and approximately how much time of them you might utilize include that in your templating, too. It simply makes your schedule a great planning tool. So I know in this case in the concepting phase, we always lead out with a creative development meeting. That meeting for this type of project is going to have an account manager, an art director and a graphic designer invited to it. whoever they might end up being. And we usually schedule a one hour meeting, so I need an hour of each of their time. This schedules tells me that I have three days to get that meeting scheduled and accomplished. So any adjustment I make, I can easily change level of effort as well as duration. With any durational adjustment, you'll notice that the rest of my schedule is naturally adjusting because I created my template with workflow dependancies. This way I have a very fluid schedule that I can easily adjust and immediately see the ramifications to any change that I make. So I know if that change is gonna have an ill effect on my schedule, and I can further adjust. Any tasks after you've set up your plan can also be set with a hard constraint. So if something needs to finish on a certain date or no later than, we can indeed set that constraint on that task and that will remove the fluidity of that task so that it will alert us if we're running out of time to meet those deadlines. Two things I'd like to mention about the project schedules in Workamajig. One is that the schedules will default, skipping the weekends for project planning. We typically don't plan to work on the weekends. Sometimes we end up working on the weekends even though we didn't plan to, so that's the system default. If there's ever a need to actually plan for weekend work, you can always overwrite that default. But that's typically not the standard. There's also a company calendar in Workamajig That company calendar will allow us to not only let the entire company know about meetings and such that we want everyone to be aware of. It's also a place where we can put any So if we're planning on having the offices closed for Memorial Day or Independence Day or any of the other variable holidays throughout the year, we'd want to make sure that we put those on the company calendar well in advance so that all of our projects will also recognize those as non working days and naturally skip over those for our project planning purposes, ensuring that we're not going to accidentally plan for tasks or projects to be due on days, we're not actually planning on working. Now once we have that plan put together again, that's gonna give us multiple ways of estimating for a project. Just like we talked about in the sales module. When we go to do an estimate for a project, we have a couple of different variables that we can do. One would be to have estimates brought in through our template.