NetChecklist.com Project Setup Video

This video explains how to set up and manage projects in the NetChecklist.com task management application.

Video Transcript - Setting Up and Managing Projects Within the Task Management Application NetChecklist.com

Hi, welcome to another video tutorial on the web application NetChecklist.com. In this video I'm going to talk about setting up and managing projects within the application.

In the context of this application, a project is something that you're working on or someone or some organization you're doing work for. This application does not define a Project in the same way that people in the Project Management world define it. The Project Management world, they basically define a Project as something that is not part of an organization's standard operations. So according to their definition, building a home would not be a "Project" for a home building company because that would be a part of their standard ongoing business operation. A true "Project" for them would be something like implementing a new accounting system. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that definition, it's just not how the term "Project" is used in THIS application. In this application, building a home would definitely be a project for a home builder and that's exactly the type of "Project" that this application is designed to help with. The whole purpose of this application IS for managing normal business operations.

A project can be something that you start and finish, like building a home, but it can also be something that's ongoing. For an accounting firm, a project could be a client that they do work for year after year on an ongoing basis. A project is simply a way to separate the different things you're working on.

So here we are again logged in as our fictional user Bob Broker and like everything in this application except for the user login accounts, all projects must belong to an organization so before we can do anything with projects we have to go into one of the organizations that Bob is a member of, let's go into this one. Now that we're in an organization, we can manage our projects for this organization by coming up on the main menu and clicking the Org Setup button to open the list of links and selecting the one labeled "Projects" which takes to our "Projects" page.

Over here on the left side of the screen, we can see that we're already on a page where we can create a new project for this organization so all we would have to do is type in a name for the new project and then click the "Add Project" button. Over here in the right side of the screen we can see a list of all of the active projects that already belong to this organization and we can edit any one of those by simply clicking on its button to select it. Once one of your projects is selected notice that its button does show up slightly darker than the others, indicating that it is the project that is currently selected. Here you could change the name of the project, make it inactive and add any notes about this project. If you make any changes and you're ready to save them, you need to click the "Save Changes" button and your changes will be saved to the database.

Finally, at the bottom of the edit project page, you may or may not have a button that allows you to delete the current project. Here this one does have the delete project button and it does exactly what you'd expect it to do - it deletes the project. If we select another one that doesn't have that button we do get an explanation where the button would be that explains why we can't delete this project. It says: "You cannot delete the current project because it is referenced in Tasks, Recurring Tasks, Checklists Copied or Recurring Checklists that exist in the database. You would have to delete all of these before you could delete the Project. Alternatively, you can just make the Project inactive to hide it.". So, the easiest thing to do with a project whenever you think you're done working on it is to simply make it inactive.

Notice that the title above our list of projects says that this is a list of the "Active" projects for this organization so it's currently displaying Active projects only. Also, notice up here that there two radio buttons where we can select whether or not we want to display inactive projects and "No" is currently selected. If we select the "Yes" radio button and then click the "Update Inactive Projects" button and now you see that the title up here above the list of projects now says "Active and Inactive Projects" and there's now an additional project being displayed that shows that it is inactive.

If a project is marked "Inactive", it' won't show up in any of the other places in the application where you select the name of a project. I'll quickly show you one of the places I'm talking about, notice that "321 Somewhere Place" is the one that's inactive. Let's to to the "Copy Checklist" page and if we click the drop down menu to select a project, that one is not showing up here because it's inactive.

Let's go back to our projects page to look at one other thing. When we were here before, you may have noticed the project at the top of the list called "No Particular Project". In this application, all of the tasks you create must be assigned to a project that belongs to the organization and most organizations are going to have some types of tasks that don't specifically apply to any of the projects they're working on - things like general accounting or marketing tasks.

Whenever a new organization is created in the application, the system automatically creates a "catch all" project for the new organization called "No Particular Project" for those general, non project specific types of tasks to be assigned to. Now, if you don't like that name, you can certainly change it to whatever you prefer and you can also delete it or mark it inactive. Projects are displayed in ascending order based on the project name so the application puts the asterisk and space at the beginning of the name "No Particular Project" so it will always show up at the top of the list of projects but again, you can change that if you want to.

Let's talk for one more minute about Projects that you're done working with. Remember this is the one we can't delete and let's quickly go over to our checklists copied page - I know I haven't showed you this page yet but let me change one thing here quickly and we see here a previously copied checklist that was copied for that project. So this is the reason why we can't delete that project. We do see at the bottom that all of the items from this checklist copy have been completed but that actually makes no difference because even though they've been completed, they're still in the database.

The existence of this checklist copy is a reason why we won't have the "Delete Project" button for that project so we could use the "Delete This Copy and All of It's Items" link to delete it and if this was the only thing related to this project in the database then we would be able to delete that project but remember that there could also be several other types things that could exist in the database that would also keep us from being able to delete a project. So if you're done working on a project and you don't want to go to the trouble tracking down and deleting everything related to it you can just make it inactive.

I guess there technically is one other alternative to marking a Project inactive or deleting it that I don't recommend you using. You could just change the name of a project you're done working with to the name of a new project you're starting. I'll show you why I don't think this is a good idea. Notice again that the project name says "123 Anywhere Drive".

Let's go back to the projects page and edit that project to change it's name and I'll leave the street number the same and change the street name to "New Street" and save the change then let's go back to the checklists copied page. Notice that now on that same checklist copy we just looked at, the project name shows "123 New Street" which is obviously misleading. If anyone looked back at this, they would think that this checklist was completed for that new project which it wasn't. It's doing this because we simply renamed the other project and this is why I don't recommend doing that.

So that's what you need to know about working with projects in this application.