Get started managing a project

After you’ve changed the project status to Current, it’s time to manage it. Several things usually happen when a project has a status of Current, depending on your organization’s processes. A common practice is for your project to appear on reports along with other projects. Upper managers may be monitoring many projects. In a report like this, they can see the progress status of each project. The progress status is not the same as the project status. It will show you if a project is on schedule, running behind, or already past due according to its planned completion date. Does your project depend on tasks being completed in other projects? If so, you can set up cross-project predecessors and you can see those dependencies in a Project Gantt view like this. We have a dependency on the Summer Catalog project and it’s showing as behind. We can click on the project name to drill down and get more details. Using the Status view, I can see that some tasks have been completed, but they’re still waiting for approvals. I can click on a task to drill down further. Going to the Approvals tab, I can get more information about who is assigned to approve this task. I can also go to the Updates tab to see any comments. I can reply to the comment right here. Updates are a great way to communicate with stakeholders. Put all questions and answers right in the project so you have an easy access record of all problems and decisions. If we ask or answer a question here, all the recipients also get it in an email with a link to these comments. There’s another easy way to send comments to everybody on the team. Going back to the project level, I can choose People and then I can click Update All to send a message to everybody in the team all at once. We can see this in the project updates. Workfront has many automatic notifications that can be turned on or off by your system or group administrator. Here are some that relate to members of the project team. In order to manage a project, it’s important that all workers update the status of their work frequently. Taking a few minutes at the end of each day works best for most organizations. This was just a quick overview about managing a project. There are many tutorials that go into more detail on things presented here. A few of them are listed in the tutorial text following this video.