Using PP effectively for my business
Hi everyone. I'm new to PP. I'd like to get some thoughts from you about how to use PP effectively for my business, so that its structure (milestones, tasks, projects, etc) works for us and not against us. Right now it's unclear how to fit what we do into that structure, so let me give a brief sketch of our business. The majority of our work at present is in videography, post-production, teaching and programming. In a given month, we'll have a number of video shoots for various clients, most of which have few deliverables, often just handing the tapes to the client after the event. How should we fit this into the structure of PP? Should we have a project called just Videography, which has one milestone for each gig? Should we have a project for each client, with milestones and tasks? Does each gig need to have its own project?
Also, searching the forum and manual turned up very little about the calendar features. Any pointers on this would be much appreciated. Thanks!
One reason to have one project per gig is that you need to separate who has access to what information. If you had only one "Videography" project, all your customers could see the information about the other customers.
Then if you want to identify what kind of project that is, you could add tags like [videography] in the name of the project.
Something like "[vid] Todd Carpenter's wedding" or "[prog] Island Corp. intranet"
Then, you can look at the messages as the place where you do announcements or communicate with the customer on different points like the details of the event, the color scheme wanted...
Depending on how you usually structure your work, you could have a task list called "Deliverables" for all of your projects and check them off as soon as they're done and maybe other tasks lists for each of the deliverable.
Use the milestones for the different stages of the project or the deadline for the deliverables (that you can link to the relevant tasks list).
As for the files, you can just put drawings, drafts, contracts... maybe linked to corresponding messages.
Finally, you could use the form to have a survey on how you did your job or something like that...
Overall, it really seems to me that ProjectPier could work really well for what you're doing since you have many small projects. ProjectPier should help you having a place where to gather information about all this but still keeping it simple enough for your needs and customers.
Do I sound like a used-cars salesman? :)
Tim
Thanks, Tim! That's a big help. Can you think of any drawbacks to atomizing things into multiple projects like that?
Regarding "[vid]" tags in the title -- it's definitely good for visually distinguishing a type of project but is it doable with the tagging feature?
Regarding atomizing, I think you kind of have to do it anyway if you want your customers to use ProjectPier too.
I can't really think of any big drawback because you always have the "My tasks" page that would show you all the tasks at once. You can use the projects and calendar feeds to get information for all your projects too.
There is one thing actually: you won't be able to search something over all your projects (I think it was requested at some point though).
For the tags, you won't be able to use the tag objects to do that, that's why I was suggesting you make the distinction in the title. The tags are used only inside a project.
Tim