Create a project template and learn about Blueprints

Transcript

In this video, you’ll learn how to create a template from scratch and also how to create templates from existing projects. Let’s get started. The first option is to create a template from scratch which you can easily do from the template section and you’ll see the list of my templates that currently exist. To create a brand new template from scratch, you’re going to just click new template and it will bring up the template landing page, much like your workflow for creating a new project from scratch, you’ll do the same with templates. I’m going to go ahead and name this, Marketing Video Production. We’ll go ahead and click to save. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to really take the first three most important steps to get this template created, and that is to create tasks, to set up the timeline of these tasks using duration and predecessors. And then finally, I’m going to make assignments. So let’s get started with step one and two by creating those tasks and setting up their timeline. And then we’ll actually pause to go over assignments and what best practices are for setting up your assignments within a template. Now that we have our task created, we have the timeline set up using durations and predecessors and we’ve made assignments, we want to just pause here so you can really see why I did what I did on this project template. So as you can see on the far left hand side that I’ve got all my tasks set up and they’re organized according to parent child task relationships. This is a great way to organize your tasks and it’s a great way to summarize all of the steps for producing certain parts of this process. For example, writing the script, you’ll see that we have draft of the script and the script approval, all have a certain duration for completing those tasks. All that rolls up into the parent task giving us some summary data for those parent child task relationships. Now, the durations and predecessors are going to be your best estimate as to the timeframe that you need and the order, the sequence in which you want to accomplish those tasks. The final element is making assignments. Now that you have those dates set up for when you want your task to start and finish, you really want to make assignments to job roles rather than individual users. These job roles are going to allow you to use our resource scheduling and planning functionalities so that you can down the road when you actually want to produce a a video for your marketing team, you can actually find the individuals, the copywriters, the editors, the production artists that have the time and certainly the skill set to do what you need to do. Now that we have our template created, we are ready to go ahead and produce video from this project template. Let’s show you how. I’m going to go back up to the projects area, I’m going to find this new project button. When I click on that, you guys already know that you have the two options to create a project from scratch or to use a template, and that’s the whole point of this class is to make sure you guys are using these templates to the best of your ability to capture these standardized workflows. So now whenever my marketing video guys want to produce a video, they’re just going to click on marketing video production, they’ll go ahead and name their project, in this case, it’s going to be Client Testimonials, and then they’ll go ahead and make a couple adjustments to perhaps the plan start date, maybe we want this to start, so the 29th of May.

And then in this instance, we’ll go ahead and have this start with the planning status.

Now, because we’ve created those tasks, the timeline for those tasks and the assignments, there’s really just a couple things that we need to do to make sure that this project plan is set up how we want. First thing is going to be really the same path as we did before. We’re going to make sure that the tasks are set up how we want. So in this case, maybe I’m reviewing this and maybe, you know, we want to have a proofing process in here with our script writing. So I’m going to go ahead and we’ll just select the task, and we’ll go ahead and right click on it, we’ll insert a task above our script approval. And I’m just going to add a task here that says Proof Script. And then we’ll go ahead and save that. And I’m going to make some adjustments to the duration of this. Maybe this will take us a couple weeks to get that done.

And you’ll see here that this is starting to fit into the flow of my timeline. I’m going to go ahead and add a predecessor now. This is going to happen after we draft a script. We’ll save this, and this is how you’re going to really enhance the standardized workflow of what you’re doing. Now some of you certainly aren’t going to want your project managers to come in here and change what it is that you’ve set up for them, but let me tell you something that’s really going to help is if your project managers are coming in and they’re actually able to adjust the project templates and able to improve them, and you want to see maybe what they’re doing to improve the process and the workflow of getting, in this case, videos completed, then this is a great opportunity for you to let them off the hook a little bit and let them add and change some things about the timeline just so you guys can optimize how it is you’re executing your projects. So now that I’ve got in some extra tasks in here, I’m going to make sure that the timeline is set up and I did that just a moment ago, and we’ll go ahead and we will make sure that our assignments, for example, this new task here has a copywriter job role.

And then really the next steps from here, once we save all these changes, are to make specific assignments, and I’m not going to do that now just because we would go into perhaps using our resource scheduling tool. You could even just do a quick assignment, a smart assignment here by having Ann on this task. We’ll just go ahead and we’ll just see who else is available, not even available, but really who has that job role, we’ll have Ken do here. And then you’ll go through and make all of these assignments out as you’re wanting to execute your project. And let’s flash forward here, and let’s say that we’ve gone through and this project is maybe near completion or we’ve just completed the project. One of the things you can do if you have a new and improved way of producing videos, you can take these existing projects and you can save them as a template. All you need to do is save as template. I’m going to go ahead and we’ll do that, and there’s really a three step process, pretty simple, where we’ll name the template, we’ll call this, New Marketing Video Production, and we can attach any custom forms that we want. I’m going to go ahead and just go to the next step and we can decide from the existing project what is it that we want to keep, what is it that we want to clear out. Certainly things like, maybe documents that we want to clear out. There might be things like expenses and other items that you maybe just don’t want to capture on the template natively. So we’ll go ahead and just clear those things out and then we’ll go ahead to the next step where we can, if we needed to, maybe remove some of the tasks that we added ad-hoc to this project as we were executing it, that was really just relative to what we’re doing here. For us, really everything went pretty standard. So we’re happy with what the tasks are in this project, we’ll go ahead and finish and save it as a template. Now, next time you want to go ahead and build out a project from a template and especially producing a video, you’ll see that in our project section we can create a new project, and yes, we still have the old marketing video production template here, but you’ll see that we have the new marketing video production template just below it. Certainly you don’t want to have too many of these templates piling up, so we could go ahead and manage our templates by going back into that templates area and getting this cleaned up. So I would go ahead and we would just delete some of these out of here so that we don’t have any confusion about the next time somebody from our video team wants to go ahead and produce a video for the marketing department. -