Manage Projects

Whether you’re a project manager overseeing every stage of a project or a team member assigned specific tasks, managing work on projects is a shared responsibility. This article provides an overview of how to keep projects moving forward, from staying on top of assignments to navigating roadblocks and schedule changes. By actively managing your work and collaborating with your team, you’ll help ensure projects stay on track and reach successful completion.

This article covers the following topics:

• Managing work on projects
• Managing adjustments to projects
• Managing roadblocks and project holds
• Completing projects

Project Management: Overview

When working on a project, you are responsible for more than just completing individual tasks: you’re helping drive the project to successful completion. Projects incorporate many moving parts, and understanding how to manage each of those parts ensures smoother execution and better outcomes. Below are some examples of what could be part of managing a project:

• Managing and Overseeing Work: Each project consists of tasks assigned to different team members. As these tasks are completed throughout the project lifecycle, they aid in moving the project toward the finish line. Staying on top of assignments, collaborating with team members, and updating task statuses all contribute to the overall progression of the project.
  
  TaskRay Pro Tip | Managing Assignments 
  Refer to the Manage Tasks article for an overview of processes related to updating tasks and completing work.
• Managing Details: Whether you need a comprehensive overview of the work on a project or need to update some field-level information, every project has a detailed view. For a deeper overview of how to do this, refer to the Manage Project Details section of the article.
• In-Flight Adjustments: Projects don’t always follow the original plan. You may need to make real-time changes such as rescheduling work, reassigning tasks, or updating statuses. These adjustments help maintain flexibility and ensure the project can still be delivered successfully, even if priorities shift.
• Project Holds: Sometimes, the unexpected happens. Any project could encounter delays, a change in priorities, or blockers that prevent the work from moving forward. When this occurs, a project may need to be temporarily paused or placed on hold. 
• Collaborating via Chatter: If you need to collaborate with other team members or provide a status update, the Chatter tab on the project or task is the place to do so. You can @mention teammates, post updates, and share relevant links or documents to keep everyone aligned.
• Project Insights: Reviewing project performance helps ensure you’re on track. Use project insights to check progress against deadlines, spot risks early, and take action to keep everything moving forward.

TaskRay provides several options for managing projects, and the following views are most commonly used for this purpose. Each view is designed with a unique purpose in mind to support flexible workflows, and you’ll likely navigate between views depending on your role and project goals:

• Plan View: Visualizes the entire project plan on a timeline. This is a great place to structure your project, manage dependencies, and adjust schedules.
• Kanban View: Displays tasks in status columns, offering a streamlined way to manage assignments. It’s ideal for tracking progress, updating statuses, and collaborating with team members in real time.
• Portfolio View: Offers a top-level overview of all your projects, surfacing key metrics and performance indicators. Perfect for monitoring progress across your project portfolio and identifying where attention is needed.
• Spreadsheet View: A simple table interface that provides an efficient way to view and update task data in bulk. Great for power users who need to make quick changes across multiple tasks.

Project Management: Workflows

Manage Projects

There are times when your in-flight projects need to be adjusted, whether it’s updating detailed information, responding to shifting priorities, or making structural changes to keep things on track. TaskRay makes it easy to manage these updates throughout the project lifecycle.

Manage Project Details

Project Detail Modal

Throughout the course of a project, its details may change, priorities could shift, or it might be necessary to add more context along the way. The Project Detail modal is the central place to manage project information, such as to provide contextual details, align priorities, or provide status updates to reflect the project's health. 

To update project details:

1. In the Projects left sidebar, locate and select the project you want to update.
2. Double-click on the Project Name to open the Project Detail modal.
3. In the modal, click on the Edit button or on the pencil icon next to a field to enter editing mode. 
4. Make updates to the fields as needed.
5. Click Save.

Note that the Project Detail modal is organized into tabs for additional functions. These are used for related project processes, such as managing attachments or coordinating team changes. We'll review some of them in more detail further in the article.

Portfolio View

Another approach to managing project details is in Portfolio View. Portfolio View makes it easy to manage multiple projects at once and keep key information up to date without drilling into each project individually.

Here, the columns represent fields from the project, and it is possible to update values using in-line editing. Additionally, the columns are customizable, and you can adjust configurations to display fields based on what you need to reference or update.

Follow the steps below to manage project details in Portfolio View:

1. Navigate to the projects you want to edit: Open Portfolio View and use the Project Filter menu to pull up relevant projects. 
2. Add or customize columns: Click the Gear icon in the top right corner of page header to open the Configure Columns pane. Move the desired fields from the Available Fields box to the Selected Fields box. This will add columns that display data from those fields for each project on the board.
3. Edit project data directly in the view: Hover over a cell in a column and click the Pencil icon to make changes. Depending on the field type, you will need to press Enter on your keyboard to apply changes.
   

Scheduling Adjustments

Making scheduling adjustments to project plans could be necessary when timelines shift or requirements change. There are a couple of main ways to manage scheduling in TaskRay.

Plan View

Plan View is designed to visualize the project plan on a timeline, making it the ideal place to manage scheduling adjustments. It is important to note that scheduling in TaskRay is driven by tasks, which means that scheduling changes must be made at the task level, and their projects will automatically adjust to reflect the new task schedules. For more information on how to manage such updates, see the Manage Task Schedules section of the Plan View article.

Advanced Scheduler

Using the Advanced Scheduler, you can apply scheduling changes to project plans in bulk in a matter of a few clicks. It allows you to:

• Shift the entire project schedule
• Compress or expand timelines
• Preview changes in draft mode before applying them to live projects

Project Holds

Stalls and delays happen, and when they do, a project may need to be temporarily paused. To manage these situations and ensure your portfolio remains accurate, you can place a project on hold. When a project is on hold, it will be removed from the active TaskRay interface until the hold is removed.

Learn more about the available options:

• On-Hold Projects: Basic
• On-Hold Projects: Advanced

Team Changes and Assignments

Project teams aren’t always static: team members may shift roles, transition off projects, or new contributors might need to be added. These changes may require swapping out team members and reallocating responsibilities to keep the work moving forward.

When tasks need to be reassigned, there are two main ways to manage the changes:

• Individually, by reassigning specific tasks directly to new team members.
• In Bulk, using the Team tab in the Project Detail modal to reassign multiple tasks from one team member to another.

This flexibility helps ensure responsibilities stay aligned, even when team dynamics evolve mid-project. 

Manage Team

The Dynamic Team Builder on a project allows you to add or remove team members and reassign work as needed. This is especially useful when roles shift or team members change throughout the project lifecycle. This is also the place where you can reallocate tasks in bulk from one team member to another.

Task Assignments

If you need to make a one-off task assignment change, you can do that in a few different places within TaskRay, including directly on the task card or from within task views. Check out this article for more information on Task Assignments. 

Complete Projects

Throughout the project lifecycle, tasks move through various stages to eventually reach completion. As tasks are marked complete, they contribute to the overall progress of the project.

Once all task work is finished, there is a final step to designate the project itself as complete. Marking the project as complete helps with tracking, reporting, and keeping your TaskRay workspace clean and organized.

The TaskRay Project object includes two key fields for tracking project completion:

• Progress: A calculated field that reflects the percentage of completed tasks in the project.
• Completed: A checkbox used to indicate when a project is officially finished.

These fields operate independently. This means that even if the Progress reaches 100%, the Completed checkbox will not be updated to 'true' automatically. This default behavior is in place to account for variations in different business processes. For example, some processes might require additional final activities to take place on the project before fully closing it out. Meanwhile, other processes might not incorporate such activities. 

Follow these steps to mark a project as complete in TaskRay:

1. Navigate to the project that you would like to complete and open its Project Details.
2. Click the Complete button.
   
3. In the pane that opens, choose Just complete the project to proceed with a simple completion.
4. Click Complete to finalize.
   

Archive or Delete Projects

It’s a best practice to archive completed projects to keep the TaskRay workspace clean and focused on active work. Archived projects are removed from the TaskRay interface, but can still be viewed and reported on in Salesforce.

For more information, see the Archive or Delete Projects article.