Birds are chirping, grass is growing and it’s probably raining.
The home repair stores put cleaning and organization products at the front of the store.
It must be spring!
While cleaning and refreshing your house is on the mind, let’s turn your attention to your Workzone workspaces. You’ve been so busy getting things done lately that sometimes, your workspaces get a little dusty.
I asked the Workzone Support Specialists for their help and I got a great list of 5 things you can do today to get your workspaces clean again.
1. Mark Projects Complete
You’ve been busy completing projects…it happens, especially in Workzone :). While it’s nice to see all of those green check marks to remind you of jobs well done, they add up to clutter your workspace. So let’s clean them up.
The first way is just by clicking the check mark on the Projects module. You’ll be prompted with three options and you should just select “Completed”. That will mark the project complete and remove it from view.
The second way is great for when you have a bunch of projects to mark complete. Head over to Reports, then find “Active Projects 100% Complete” on the left hand side and you’ll be shown a list of projects that have all all of their tasks finished. Select them all and mark them complete.
Pro tip: If you have a lot of completed projects, cleaning up completed projects will speed up Projects module!
2. Close Stale or Incomplete Approvals
Every workspace has an approvals dashboard. Whether or not you are using Workzone, if you are working with internal or external clients, you are familiar with a process where you need approvals from your clients to move a project along. Sometimes, documents may go unapproved and may clutter your approvals dashboard if you get busy.
All you need to do is close the older approvals to clean up your dashboard. It will not harm the project if it is still active, don’t worry!
3. Remove Unused Columns in the Projects Module
Over time, it’s possible that you’ve added on columns that, at some point, was useful for a project or two, but are now just cluttering up your view in the Projects module. Take a look at your columns and ask whether or not you need them in your day to day management of projects. If not, remove them in Setup.
4. Cut Down Tasks Within Projects
Remove tasks? Isn’t this what you bought Workzone for? Yes, but this tip is more strategic and customized to your team’s workflow. This tip isn’t a box to check off or level to pull within Workzone’s settings.
Over the years we’ve learned that some teams have a tendency to over-engineer their projects with too many detailed tasks. For example, if you have a brochure getting done, just create tasks that account for the hand-offs between team members, instead of having every little step detailed in the job. These extra tasks could defeat the purpose of how Workzone actually saves a team time.
5. Edit Permissions and Visibility on Document Folders
Document management is essential to managing projects. Whether folders are associated with projects or not, you should ensure that a user is seeing only the folders they should be…not just for security purposes, but to help them focus on their work more easily. If you aren’t sure on how to handle this, check out the help docs or contact a Support Specialist.
Writing this blog reminds me of all the cleaning I need to do. Anyone have a coupon to Home Depot or Lowe’s?
Happy spring cleaning!
Steve Pogue is the Marketing Operations Manager at Workzone. He writes about project management tips and the buying process. When not at Workzone, you can find him playing vintage base ball or playing with his daughter.
