Understand basic project creation

A project is defined as work you want to get done, like creating the summer catalog. You start by going to the projects area and clicking on New Project. From here you have a few choices, including using a template. You’ll learn about these in other videos. In this video you’ll create a project from scratch by clicking on New Project here. The project name is Untitled Project by default. We’ll rename it Summer Catalog. Click anywhere to save the name. There should be a specific goal to accomplish. You can put this in the description, along with the target time frame. Let’s say you want to get this done by May 15th. And you want to start it on April 1st. You can break the project into individual tasks. Tasks are defined as planned work. You can estimate some task durations and make some assignments.

You can add predecessors to sequence your tasks. When you’re ready to start, you set the status to Current. Now the project will show up on reports and the project team will get notifications. As you proceed with your project, unexpected things may come up. You’ll record these as issues, or unplanned work. An issue describes something that you want to look into further before you decide what you want to do about it. You may decide to plant it into your project by converting it to a task. Or you might decide to send it to another project. Or you may decide not to do it at all. We’ll use these three issues to illustrate three ways to deal with an issue. There are additional ways that you’ll learn about in other videos. Let’s go ahead and convert this issue to a task so you can see how it’s done. Just open the issue, open the three-dot menu, and select Convert to Task. The new task will have the same name as the issue unless you decide to change it. Click Convert to Task and it will appear at the bottom of your task list. Since you added more work to your plan, you may want to adjust some timelines. But now your plan completion date is slipping. You decide you can do creative and photoshoot at the same time. This brings your completion date back to the 15th. Next we’ll go ahead and move an issue to another project so they can take care of it. Just open the issue, open the three-dot menu, and select Move to. Enter the destination project name and click on Move Issue. Now the Fall Catalog project owns this issue. Let’s go check our issues. If you decide you’re not going to work on an issue, you can change the status to Won’t Resolve and be done with it. Now we have our issue to convert a task converted to a task. The issue status will now reflect the status of the task and it will automatically be changed to Complete when the task is marked as Complete. The issue to move another project has been successfully moved, so it’s not holding up this project anymore. And the issue to decide not to do it all has been changed to Won’t Resolve Status, so it’s closed as well. A project will be considered complete when all the tasks are completed and any issues are resolved. We recommend you start with simple projects. Don’t worry about all the settings, just fill in a few things, like the duration and predecessors. Take the defaults for everything else for now, like task constraints and duration types. Later you can dig deeper into project management features and best practices.