Tasks and Scheduling: Overview

What the Tasks and Scheduling module does

The Tasks and Scheduling module is a set of tools for managing your team’s work. With it you set up reusable task lists, plan the tasks for a job, schedule work for your crews and keep track of your own tasks. What the module does for a company is on the Task & Crew Scheduling product page; these pages are how to use it.

Key Concepts

Task Templates

Task Templates are reusable checklists for your common jobs. If you do the same kind of work over and over, you can create a template with all the steps involved, so you don’t have to create the same list of tasks every time you start a new job. Every job then follows the same steps, and none are missed.

Task Plans

A Task Plan is where you take a Task Template and apply it to a specific job. Once you’ve added a template to a job, you can change it, set due dates, and assign tasks to different people. You can also link tasks together, so a task does not become available until the ones it depends on are finished. A task that has already been put on someone’s schedule is the exception: it can start regardless.

Task Scheduling

Task Scheduling is how you take tasks from your Task Plan and put them on a calendar, for work a field crew has to do on a particular day. You can see who is available and drag tasks onto their schedule.

Personal Task Management

This is your personal to-do list: every task assigned to you, scheduled or not. You update a task’s status from here as you work through it.

Task Dashboard

The Task Dashboard is the office’s view of the same work. It is one list of every task that still needs attention, drawn from every job at once, so you can sort and filter across the whole company instead of opening one Task Plan at a time. It is a report: you read the tasks there, but you make changes in the Task Plan, the Task Scheduler or your own task screens.

How It All Fits Together

The pieces work together like this:

1. You start by creating Task Templates for the different types of work you do.
2. When you get a new job, you create a Task Plan for it, using one of your templates as a starting point. You assign the tasks to your team.
3. For tasks that need to be done on a specific day, you use Task Scheduling to put them on the calendar for your crews.
4. Each team member then uses their Personal Task Management screen to see what they need to do, whether it’s a scheduled task for the day or an office task they can work on when they have time.
5. Whenever you need to see across jobs rather than within one, you open the Task Dashboard, which lists every outstanding task in the company in a single grid.