14. Projects [12:32]
Description: This video provides an overview of the Projects tab in the Core3 CRM.
Transcript:
Let’s take a closer look at the Projects tab in the Core3. The Projects tab will look like this. Here you can track, manage, and create all of your projects relating to your company’s unique project management system. The Status Toolbar allows us to see how many records we have and flip through the records; currently we only have one project record. We have the option to create a new project record, delete a record, perform finds, sorts and much more depending on how you have your Status Toolbar set up.
0:42 Let’s begin by creating a new record and linking the project record to a company, I’ll go ahead and link this to ABC Company and you can also link it to a specific individual if you’d like and I will link it to John Smith at ABC Company. When you link a project to a company or individual it allows you to conveniently navigate to the individual or company by selecting the blue arrow here. And then on the Contacts tab under the Projects area here; I can view all of the associated projects with that individual. And here is my new project that I have not assigned a title to yet so I’ll go ahead and select that blue arrow and navigate back to my project. I’ll go ahead and give this project a title, set up an event here, you can enter a brief description for the project, assign the project to a Category, and this is an editable list so you can select Edit and you could add additional category values here and we’ll make a category called Fundraisers. Assign the project a priority here I’ll go ahead and select High.
1:57 And now you can assign Roles to the project. You select the green plus button to add a role to the project and assign a role to a contact. The contact specified must be a contact that exists on the Contacts tab. So I’ll go ahead and enter a contact here, I’ll enter myself, and the Roles are an editable drop down list so I’ll go ahead and edit that list, you can put values in here that are more relevant to your organization. And I’ll go ahead and add in a few more contacts on there and I’ll make Melinda the Organizer, Sally can be the Trainer, and so forth. You can assign this to a specific Department and I’ll go ahead and put this in the Sales Department. And you can enter a Stage. Stages should be set up before projects are created and stages are set up in the Core Preferences area. You can then select a Start Date for the project I’ll start it on Monday the 8th, and you can also enter an End Date for the project; we will end it on the 12th here. The Total Time field is auto calculated from the related timers in hours, minutes, and seconds. And the Percentage Complete is a weighted calculation field based off of each project’s line items, start dates, end dates, and percentage done values. As we add project items and timers we will see how the total time and percentage complete are calculated.
3:34 So let’s go ahead and add a few new project line items here. Setup the Ballroom, and we’ll go ahead and assign this to a specific Core User, we can enter a start date here; we’ll give Marc two days to set up the ballroom. Assign that to Sally here, and we’ll give Sally a day there to train the staff, and let’s make the Gala Event on the 12th here. And Categories, if you’re wondering, are set up in the Core Preferences area so if you would need to add additional categories you would simply go into the Core>Preferences, navigate to the Global Settings>Activity Categories, and then here are all of our Project Item Categories. So I’ll go ahead and just add a new category here; I’ll call it Events. And as discussed in the Preferences video for the Core3 you can give project categories different colors, I’ll make this one pink. You can bold them, italicize them, make them inactive…that’s discussed in another video so I’ll just go ahead and select Done. And then we’ll assign this category to the Events category.
5:23 And this here allows me to sort the order in various orders. So I can go ahead and put a “1” there, maybe a “2” there, “3” there, “4” there, and that just then changes the sort order of all of your project items. And as you can see the Total Time and Percentage complete have not been filled out yet because there’s one value missing right here. So all the values; the percentage done, the start and end time for all the project items, have to be complete in order for the Percentage Complete to be calculated. The Total Time is going to come into play as soon as we start entering timers for the project. Let’s go ahead and we’ll enter a timer for Sally on the 10th, and I’ll go ahead and just change some of these values here, then I’ll go back to the project. And we’ll just add a few timers as well for Marc on the 8th and 9th, and let’s go ahead and add another one. And if you wanted to view all timers you could simply go back to the project, navigate to the Timers tab; and as this list grows we will clearly need to be able to view more than three timers so you just go ahead and select this icon on the far right here and see this icon here with these three lines? This allows us to view all of the timers in a List View for the event.
7:21 What I’m going to do is just go ahead and change some of these values here to reflect the user that would technically be logged in and entering timers. Navigate back to the project and I’ll enter one more timer for Melinda here, and so forth. So you get the gist of how to enter timers associated to projects. And now that I’ve filled out my timers, my Total Time field has also populated with 12 hours 0 minutes and 42 seconds; because the Total Time field is auto calculated from the related timers. So that’s it, I’ve created a new project, assigned a title and description to the project, added roles to the project, entered project items, associated timers to the project item which can all be viewed on this tab. You can also upload documents specific to the project, just select the plus button there and you can go ahead and insert a document, perhaps I had some specs related to that project. Documents are discussed in another video so I’ll just go back to the project for the event here.
8:43 And you can see there my related documents and likewise you can also have Activities associated to projects. So activities, in this case typically for projects, we have on the left, notes, events, tasks, and emails. So if I wanted to create a new note here, perhaps the décor etc., you can put in any notes that you need here and notes are discussed in the Activities video so I won’t touch on the options on the right there but you can fill them in as needed. Go ahead and select Done and now we do have activities, in this case a note, associated to the project. You can also send emails and I’ll go ahead and hit Send and that will send the email off to John or you could also hit the To field and change who you wanted to send the email to. Emails again are discussed in another video.
9:31 So once we’ve created a project you also have the option to duplicate the project, there may be a time when you don’t want to have to recreate the wheel; so you just hit the Duplicate button and that’s going to go ahead and duplicate the project. And as you can see I now have my new project here; I’ve copied over all of the relevant information, but as you can see some of the project items; the Assigned To, Start, End, Percentage Done, and Timers have been cleared out because typically those are going to be different. As well as on the right the Start Date and End date are also going to be different and we don’t have any associated Activities, Timers, or Documents.
10:09 Let’s go back to our project that we were working with and navigate to the Stage tab. The Stage tab here allows you to put the project into different stages; now stages are also indicated here in the upper right hand corner but the Stage tab just gives you a little more details as to when the project was entered into the stage. If we wanted to close it out it’s going to enter the date and the number of days in that stage, in this case it’s the same date so we have zero days on 11/11/2010. The More Info tab carries the Project Title and Project # over and also provides us with a created and modified by date, this tracks when a project was created and last modified and by whom. And all the tabs as you can see always have the Activities, Timers, and Documents tab here showing you everything that is relating to a project. These filter options allow us to filter through for Activities for example, you can go ahead and unselect the Email check box and that will remove any emails from your view if you maybe just want to hone in on the other filter options here. And these filter options are similar throughout the Core.
11:29 And now let’s look at some different view options we have here in the Core3 on the Projects tab. Up in the status area I can select the List View icon here to display the found set of records in a list view. Here you can sort by any column here; you can also select the specific project that you want to look at by selecting the blue arrow here. And we also have some Reports and Charts available which will be discussed in the Reports video.
11:59 This is just a brief overview of the many features and possibilities of the Core3. For more information on what the Core3 can do for you please explore this website, review the videos and documentation, and download a demo. Please contact us via email, phone, or browse our forum if you have any additional questions. We look forward to hearing from you and automating your business to operate more efficiently.