Congratulations! You are the proud owner of a brand new TaskRay Project. Take a second to enjoy this moment, because soon enough, it will be time to get to work. Projects in TaskRay come in many different shapes and sizes, but in this blog, I want to highlight some of the key features and functionalities to make your job a little easier when it comes to managing projects.
Now that you have all the details ironed out and you are ready to have users start working on their pieces of the Project. Let’s get the team assigned to their Tasks. When in TaskRay, you can double click the project name in the left column, which will open the Project Details modal where you will find the Team tab. The Team tab will display all the users who are working on the project and it allows quickly reassigning tasks and checklist items as needed.
In my instance, you will see the Tasks are currently owned by queues. In TaskRay, queues can be used as placeholders for task assignment, letting you know which role and by extension, which user, should own each respective Task.
As a Project Manager, you will need to be able to see Projects from a high level, to make sure everything is on track, as well as from a more detailed level to make sure the work is getting done.
For the high-level view of the project, we recommend Plan View. This is the Gantt Chart view of the project where you can see the full timeline, as well as quickly and easily make changes to dependencies, start and end dates of tasks, and even configure some additional columns to edit task details. When you reschedule Tasks in Plan View, you can see the downstream effect that change will have on the project schedule overall, as all the dependent tasks get adjusted accordingly. This view can also be exported which can be helpful if you want to send your customer an update of the project timeline.
Pro-Tip: Mix plan view with baselines to showcase the changes and progress made on the project and then export it for your customers to reference.
Another great tool to use when keeping track of your projects is the Insights tab, which can also be accessed from the Project Details modal. This view is great to get quick insights(pun intended) like overall progress, tasks at risk of becoming overdue, key milestone dates and completion, as well as Tasks owned by team members in case someone is overloaded and they need to be reassigned.
This next feature requires at least Standard Edition, but is a great way to see important project information for multiple projects at the same time. Portfolio view allows you to view multiple projects at once and you can see the overall progress, key dates, as well as any custom fields you need to track on the Project.
Along with the project reporting, you can also access the Insights tab from this view as well. Furthermore, you can also view aggregate Insights information if you select multiple projects at once.
You’ve done a great job getting the project ready to go and you are ready for your users to start their work. Let’s be sure you are confident that when users log into TaskRay, they see the work they need to do. Let’s start with My Work. This is the simplest way to have users view only the work that they own. It won’t distract them with work that is owned by others, so they can stay on track. They can easily add time, change the end date of the task, change the list status or complete it with the click of a button.
If they are in the All Work tab, we recommend keeping users in Kanban View. They can easily edit the tasks when necessary and complete them with a quick drag and drop to the Finished column.
Users can even have multiple Projects pulled into their view if they are working on different things at the same time.
Something to consider when users are in the All Work tab is board filters. We have several board filters that come out of the box and they serve different purposes. I recommend reading all about our board filters here. Aside from those out-of-the-box filters, you can create custom filters to be more specific when showing what you want to see. Only users with TaskRay – Admin permission set, can share custom filters with other TaskRay users. This can be a great way to keep users on task and only showing them the project’s/tasks that you want to see.
Being able to effectively manage your onboarding projects is a really important part of the process and I hope this blog was helpful in pointing out some key features of TaskRay that can help you along the way. Client onboarding is an artform, and TaskRay can be your canvas.