Congratulations on choosing Flectra Project to help running your company more efficiently!
Flectra Project is a super fast and easy way to make your activities and tasks visible to everyone in your company. Follow how things progress, see when things are stuck, know who's in charge, all in one place.
But because change is never easy, we've created this Planner to guide you.
For example, you'll understand why you shouldn’t use Flectra to plan but instead to
collaborate, or why organizing your projects by role is wrong.
This whole process might take you a few hours, but don't worry, you can take a break and return to it at any time: your progress is automatically saved.
Good luck!
It's essential to be clear about why you want to use Flectra Project and what your goals are. Indeed, there are many ways to manage a project, to find the best one for you, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve. And later on, we will hopefully transform your objectives into real improvements for your company.
-
What do you expect from using Flectra Project?
Examples
- More efficient communication between employees
- Improve collaboration with customers
- Identify problems and blocking points more easily
- Control projects quality and satisfaction
- Keep track of messages and conversations
- List, plan and track things to do
- Share files and manage versions
- View statistics (time spent, efficiency, etc.)
- Know what my employees are working on
- #1
- #2
- #3
The Flectra Project app can be used to manage many activities, from the development of a new product to the daily operations of a customer support. With some creativity, it can even be used to manage your marketing communications or personal projects. But just because it can be done doesn't mean it's always a good idea: let's start by helping you understand what can be a good project.
Depending on what you need and how you want to operate, there are several ways to work with Flectra. First, decide if you want to think in terms of tasks. Then, activate the Timesheets app if you need it.
1. Learn about Tasks and Timesheets.
An internal activity that should be done within a defined period of time.
Example:
During a meeting, a customer asks a manager for a few modifications to a project.
Back at the office, the manager splits the customer's requests into several tasks and delegates them to several employees.
Each employee will have his own task, while the manager will be able to follow the global progress in the Kanban view of the project.
Tasks are the main mechanism in Flectra and are activated by default.
Timesheets can be used for several purposes:
To use Timesheets, go to your Project Settings and activate 'Log work activities on tasks'
You can learn more about Timesheets in the 'Use Timesheets' section of this planner.
2. Now, take some time to list the Projects you'll need:
-
Your Projects:
- #1
with Timesheet
- #2
with Timesheet
- #3
with Timesheet
- #4
with Timesheet
- #5
with Timesheet
The Right Way to use projects: |
The Wrong Way to use projects: |
|---|---|
| Managing a group of people, a team or a department (example: R&D team, HR Department, etc.) | Don't create a Project for each of your customers - this will be too complicated to manage properly. |
| Managing long projects that span over many months and/or need Timesheets. | For the same reason, don't create a Project based on weeks or time (example: Scrum). |
| Ideally, a person should only be responsible for one project. | Don't create a Project for different locations (this could isolate teams that work at different locations). |
It is time to think about how you will transform your activities into real projects in Flectra.
For that, the most important part is defining the stages of your projects. Stages are the different steps a task can go through, from its creation to its ending. They will appear in what we call the 'Kanban' view of your projects.
-
Stages and Requirements for next stage:
-
#1
-
#2
-
#3
-
#4
-
#5
-
#6
-
#7
Creating Tasks is the next step in managing your Projects.
In Flectra, it is pretty straightforward, but here are some explanations you may find useful.
Define a Naming Convention
Add keywords in the 'Task title' field, for example [Customer name] or [Website]. This will help you navigate and search through the dozens of tasks in your project.
Add a Deadline
The deadline will help you determine if a task is progressing as expected and to anticipate its next update.
Use Tags
Tags are complementary to your project stages: they can work as a second level categorization which is very useful if you have a lot of Tasks to manage. Also, it becomes very easy to find Tasks by typing the Tag into the main Search bar.
Use Status Indicator
The Status indicator helps you manage Tasks by giving them one of 3 different colour: Grey, Green or Red. The meaning of these Statuses can be freely configured, for example:
To configure these Kanban Statuses, go to the 'Project Stages' tab of a Project.
Set Priorities
The is used to indicate priority: in Kanban views, high priority Tasks will be displayed on top. This is particulary useful if you use a Scrum methodology to indicate the tasks for the week. Similarly to Status, you can change the meaning of the Star indicator from the Project Stages tab.
Have Clear Responsibilities
The person assigned to a task is responsible for its progress and their avatar is displayed in Kanban view for quick reference. Of course, the responsibility for a task can change depending on its stage.
A great feature in Flectra is the integration of a Collaborative Notepad called Etherpad.
It replaces the standard Description area in Tasks and is extremely useful for several cases.
It can quickly become messy if everyone uses his own layout. Etherpad will allow you to create a basic template with a few titles and bullet points, making it much easier for everyone.
Etherpad allows users to simultaneously edit a text document, see all of the edits in real-time and with the ability to display each author's text in their own color.
Etherpad auto-saves the document at regular short intervals and users can permanently save specific versions at any time. Plus, a "time slider" feature also allows anyone to explore the history of the pad.
To use Collaborative Notepads, simply activate the corresponding option in your Project Settings.
Timesheets are often essential for running a company.
They are also prone to human error, repetitive, annoying, and sometimes stressful to employees.
Fortunately, Flectra has several solutions to make them as efficient and painless as possible!
Enter your activities (every day)
The same features as the Chrome extension, but on your mobile phone!
Extra useful for when you're with a customer or in a meeting.
Invoice your customers (every month)
If you work on a Time & Material project, you'll probably want to extract a Timesheet of the tasks to invoice directly to the customer. To do that:
- Activate 'Allow invoicing based on timesheets' from the Human Resources Settings.
- This will add an Invoice Tasks menu in the Project module, that can be used to select the Timesheet to invoice.
Analyze reports (every a year)
It's usually a good idea to take time to analyze your tasks once a year. Here are some KPIs you should take a look at. Ask yourself 'How can they be improved?'
For tasks:
- What is the number of missed deadlines?
- What is the difference between initial time estimation and final time spent?
- What is the average time before a task is assigned / closed?
- What is the average number of working hours necessary to close a task?
About Employees:
- What is their average number of working hours over the year?
- What is their average number of tasks worked on / closed?
Every business is different.
Flectra allows you to customize every application and it's usually a good idea to customize screens to fit your project needs.
Here are some of the available customizations
We can add fields related to your business on any screen, for example:
We can automate steps in your workflow, for example:
We can implement custom reports based on your Word or GoogleDocs templates, for example:
We have special options for unlimited number of customizations !
To increase the efficiency of your Projects, you should have a look at some of our other apps:
A project usually involves many stakeholders, be it the project's sponsor, resources, customers or external contractors. But the most important person in a project is usually the Project Manager.
In Flectra, the Project Managers have the responsibility of managing the Kanban view: they ensure smooth progression of the projects, minimal downtime between stages and optimal work distribution between resources.
Even if there is no specific field in Flectra, it's important to define a person responsible for each stage of your Project.
This person will have the responsibility for validating each stage and ensuring that the requirements to move to the next stage are met.
-
Kanban Stage
Person Responsible
- #1
-
#2
-
#3
-
#4
-
#5
-
#6
-
#7
There are two ways of managing your Kanban stages:
Managing notifications is essential: too few and you risk missing critical information, too many and you will be overloaded with unnecessary information. The trick is to find the right balance between the projects, stages and tasks you want to be informed about. Fortunately, Flectra Project has many levels of notifications and messages you can choose from.
Follow only what you need
The simplest way to use notifications is to follow a whole project: you will receive notifications for all the new and existing tasks of a project.
Don't hesitate to select only the events you are interested in!
Another good way to limit the number of notifications you receive is to only follow your Project's 'Task Assigned' events. Then you'll be notified when a Task is created, and can manually decide if you want to be notified for its other events too.
Rely on the chatter
Below every Task (or more generally, below every Document in Flectra) is an area called Chatter.
It's for logging every change, event or message related to the Document.
So if you're looking for the history of a Task, or the latest message on a Task, simply go to the corresponding Document and you'll find it!
Be careful about the messages you send
Sending a message through Flectra will automatically send an email containing your message to all the followers including internal employees, external users or customers.
An internal message will not send any email notification, but your message will still be displayed to every user that has access to the page.
If you want to limit access for certain users or customers, simply use the Privacy / Visibility settings in the Project Settings.
Create tasks by email
In Flectra, every project has an email alias. If you send an email to this alias, it will automatically create a task in the first stage of the project, with all the email recipients as its default followers.
This is particularly useful to manage help and support: all incoming email from customers will be transformed into a task that you'll be able to track easily!
Usually, a project's team members are managed through weekly (or monthly) status meetings.
Sometimes, these meetings can last hours and expose participants to an overly detailed review of the project.
Your team members will probably try to avoid those kind of meetings, or have to rush afterwards to meet their deadlines...
So how can you, as project manager, structure a weekly status meeting where team members are engaged, informed and willing to contribute to the project's next steps? Here are some tips.
Ask participants to prepare
To run an effective meeting, prepare participants beforehand. Inform them of how they are expected to contribute.
For example, risk and task owners should come prepared to share the status of their item and, ideally, a path to resolution.
Prepare yourself as well
As project manager, you also need to be fully prepared. There should be no surprises during the meeting. Surprises can undermine your ability to manage the project and cause team members to lose confidence in you.
Also, lead by example. When your team members see how prepared you are it will reinforce the need for each of them to be prepared for status meetings.
Start with an answer.
The worst question to ask is, "What did you do this week?" It invariably generates unnecessary, time-consuming dialogue from team members. Plus, you should already know what everyone on the team did during the week.
For example, risk and task owners should come prepared to share the status of their item and, ideally, a path to resolution.
It is better to start with a "project answer", such as: "We are two weeks late", "We are at planned budget" or "We are 50% complete with the process model". Also if you can, start the meeting on a positive note, such as milestones that have been met or are ahead of schedule. This will make participants feel motivated to engage in the conversation.
Be aware of the team’s productivity and time: try to keep meetings to one hour or less.
Use separate meetings to solve big tasks or tasks that aren’t important for the entire team.
Follow every meeting with a recap email As soon as the meeting is over, publish meeting minutes and distribute them along with the updated project schedule, task/action item matrix, and any other appropriate documents. Try to use the same template throughout meetings and improve it continuously.
Choose the right day
Avoid Monday mornings as your regular meeting day; choosing to meet later in the week gives participants time to get ready for the meeting and to work toward specific objectives in the days that follow.
Click on 'Reporting' on the main menu and generate statistics relevent to each profiles:
Check Workload
Exercise: Try to get a view of the workload for this week for all your employees (planned hours).
Delay to close an Task
Exercise: Try to create a graph with the monthly evolution of the 'Average delay to close' of Tasks.
Congratulations, you're done !
We hope this process helped you implement our project management application.
Don't hesitate to send us an email to describe
your experience or to suggest improvements !
- The Flectra Team
