Halo Implementation – Tracking Projects (Milestones)

hey everyone and welcome to another installment in the Halo implementation series uh in this video we're going to be uh following on our project uh series on this and we're going to be talking again about tracking projects um specifically in this video we're going to be talking about um Milestones what they are how to use them all that kind of stuff again with me today and you you know if you're a um a frequent visitor to the site you know what I'm about to say now and you know with me today I had my favorite person at Halo I have the legendary Legend of all legends and that is Mr Morgan espinal so um Mr Halo himself hey hey Morgan how you doing hey Chris thanks again for having me um and the kind words yeah not not helping my ego at all it never gets old right cool um yeah so yeah as you mentioned um we've we've seen how we can create our projects and we've seen how we can add budgets into our projects and our tasks to associate and budgeted time towards project completion in this session we'll have a look at how we can add Milestones into our project and we'll take a brief look at um some Associated functionality as well foreign the first thing that you're going to want to enable are more recent trials I believe this has been enabled uh but if you if you can't see what I'd like to show you then you'll want to enable the the Milestones feature itself and we can do that within our respective ticket types so I'm gonna go as usual to configuration and then into tickets and to your titles where in here against our typical types the bottom of our details tab we have the enablement so I'll go ahead and enter into that for our projects now when the Milestone functionality has been enabled for our respective ticket types what we'll find is a Milestones Tower here now again similar to our our budgets I suppose we have this table of contents where we're actually adding our Milestones into our project where we're just you know giving a brief description of the Milestone just a title I suppose um I'll just call this one milestone a sequence so we can actually order our Milestones of course let's start and end date for our Milestone so we can start to put uh you know rough Milestone related timeline into our projects I say it's on condensers today until the end of the month then down here we can add our child tickets our tasks into one Milestone and then finally we have our dependencies where we can make Milestones depending on one another at the minute I don't have any options in here because we don't yet have any Milestones so let me go ahead and take that first and then we'll make another one we might want that one to be rolling throughout September and we'll pick the other ticket our other trial ticket and we'll say that Milestone 2 is dependent on milestone now as it stands uh right now this current configuration you won't find uh much change from a visual aspect I suppose our one functional point to consider first and foremost is our tasks on a milestone that is dependent on another milestone will not uh be able to be actioned until our uh well in this case let me be a bit more specific in this case Milestone 2 is dependent on Milestone one so we can't work on any tasks Associated to Milestone two until all of the tasks in Milestone one been offered Milestone itself has been who needs it yeah another feature is when we using our milestones we now have an option to filter our tasks based on the Milestone that they are currently in um so again when we're talking about projects in the real world where we might have north of 40 different tasks you might not want to see them all in the list straight away you might want the option to toggle that visibility or not so by allocating Milestones to local allocating the tasks to a milestone and can then filter that list of tasks based on the Milestone that we are looking at and and it's interesting and just for you know any any sort of users coming in from a different from different PSA tools um yeah you know a lot of other PSA tools um specifically call call those phases so you've got like a whole phase of the project and then underneath those phases you have a whole bunch of tasks that you can you can work upon um and I think where you know especially if you're coming in from something like autotask it can get really confusing as to what Milestones are because in in all the tasks big a milestone is actually a billing Milestone that would be you know something along the lines of um you know we've got a fixed price that we're charging five thousand dollars for and what we're then doing is we're saying you know we're going to better different Milestones we're going to say when this phase is complete then we're going to build two thousand dollars then we're going to build another thousand dollars later on so this could get really um the terminology is different if you're coming in from a different different tool so just bear in mind if you are using another PSA tool um that you know when we're referring to Milestones in in Halo We're actually referring to kind of um to the phases we within the project cool yeah thanks for that and so one one point that I don't think we've discussed but I do believe it is quite useful when we're talking about tracking projects is how do we change the way that we view our tasks within the the tasks tag so by default here we're showing uh kanban View and we of course have the option to present again view funny enough if I click that nothing displays there's quite an important point that that is because our Gantt is a timeline we need to specify a start slash Target day for the task in question so if you're going to be using the Gantt view for your projects just bear in mind that you're going to want to be setting a start date and a Target date for your respective tasks yeah that way again can actually show something a bit more meaningful and that kind of makes sense actually because you know again you can't you can't be having a game chart which which is kind of showing when the task starts and ends if you haven't got to start an end dating name so kind of yeah it kind of makes sense that um so yeah and then and I've seen a lot of my customers when I'm Consulting on on them for Halo the exact same questions come up many times is why can't I see that when I click on the um on the game for you and that would be the reason why is because you need to have your basically your start and end date of the um of the task so yeah I'm so we've also got these three dots here where firstly we can change uh our view to to one of the other views available in Halo so table view similar to the the list of tickets that we see throughout the platform so we have a table view when we're looking at our incidents and our opportunities Etc so we can apply similar configuration here for our tasks to have been a project got a calendar view as well of course that's also dependent on start dates and Target dates actually being populated for those tasks and then we've got some options here specific to our Milestones where we can show or hide the milestones for both completed and sorry show or hide the tasks Associated to complete it and or locked milestones so again there's quite a lot of agency over exactly what tasks it is that you want to see at any given point so yeah if you know tasks against the completed Milestone you might not want to show it because they've already been done Parts against the locked Milestone you might not want to show because you're not going to be working on them you only want to see what you have to do within the current Milestone so we have that for now as well I'm going to pop back to table View just because I want to mention how we can amend the the table that we actually have here more specifically amend the column profile that's being used when viewing our targets and perhaps we might want to First add the Milestone into the our column profile and secondly we might actually want to group file as well so we can get a collapsible list of all of the tasks within our respective milestones so firstly we want to make sure that we have a column profile that is applicable for our project tasks so we can do that in configuration tickets views where we have our column profiles option down here and then we have our project task new this is something that is baked into the trials as well so you might want to amend this one instead of creating a new one from scratch what I'll do here is I'll add our milestone column in and I'll edit that column and I'll say we actually want to group by that and perhaps I want to rename it to phase as well yep so we've got our project tasked you our project task column profile it's worth mentioning how we apply this column profile to the child's tickets of a project so of course more generally speaking what we're looking at when we're talking about projects is we're looking at parent trial tickets now parent trial tickets can be applicable to more than just projects and project tasks maybe incidents and problems is another example of parent-child relationships now if we're talking about uh incident problems incidents and problems and we have a parent's problem ticket and a number of child incidents below it we don't want to show the milestone in that case because it's not applicable so we actually have different column profiles utilized for the child ticket of a given ticket title and the the key word there is given tickets later so we know from that that we're going to be amending our child ticket column profile within our ticket type configuration so I'm going to go to configuration ticket sticker types I'm going to go to the project to take the title which is of course the parents and then down here we have our column profile for child tickets so this is the option that we're making use of in order to establish the color profile that's used whenever we're viewing tasks of a project similar to that the option below is our default list type for trial tickets which we've set to kanban and that explains why when we go into our project first and foremost we see the kanban business so we could of course change that to be table view if we wanted we could change it to be either task or agent specific Gantt view um or calendar view or type or yeah any of the options in there and of course if we change the default type there at this point for to be again then we'd need to make sure that our tasks have the start and end dates against them otherwise we won't see anything again I don't think it's on this version yet but we've got an upcoming feature that is going to allow us to automatically send the start date and the target date from our ticket templates see if it's already in here that would be in our values tab that would be nice actually yeah to be able to set it at this level oh yeah so we've already got it in this version so again a couple of sessions ago we had a look at our ticket templates quite important that you go back and watch that without watching that this won't make much sense to you but one of those that have watched that will know what we're talking about when we're talking about artificial templates and within the configuration of our ticket templates we have the option to set both a default start date and a Target date so you might want to set the start date to you know today and then the target date for a week's time then everything will at least come in to that gam view it will all be the same um of course it's all going to have the same start date at the same time date unless you go into each individual task and slightly adjust those so again in the values tab and but yeah so we can default something into the start date and the target date such that if you did want to use gamview as your default you would at least have everything there present for you to then be able to amend those dates accordingly yeah yeah that would be cool I mean I think that's something that's um that would be good to good to have added in there and um and like you said if you know this this isn't going to make sense if um if you haven't watched the um you know you know the first video that we did so you know I'm gonna link to it up here somewhere I don't know which way I'm pointing wherever I am I'm gonna link to it up there somewhere and um you know go go and have a watch of that video um where we explain kind of what you know what templates are and how they work and and all of that kind of stuff lovely so um we can see that based on the change to the column profile that I added in and we've now got our tasks presented under our collapsible Milestone list now uh it's a bit weird that Milestone two is above Milestone one I believe that we can address that by changing the sequence of our Milestones so if I set one to six to refresh this is either something that we've recently changed or something we're about to change I know that other people have asked about the ordering of uh Milestones yeah okay it doesn't look like we don't yeah but uh yeah the point stands I suppose and uh in the interim you always have the option to change the name the name which I believe is what we're basing it on at the minute yeah and I would I would actually and again next you know especially if you're coming in from a different tool um you know you're using a different PSA tool this might be where kind of you know that stuff would translate into phases and tasks you might have your first Milestone called installation and your second one called or first one called setup and then the second one called installation and then third one is deployment or something like that so you might you might kind of want to break them up like that um and you know rather than just yeah calling the Milestone one turn three yes yeah absolutely now still two and one so uh if we hop back to our column profile into configuration and then into tickets used configure our column profiles namely our project tasks View we can actually see in here that we've overridden uh or we've established the sourcing in here based on our appointments yeah I'm going to take that out sort based on that yeah one more sorts by milestone refresh so now this has been reaction yeah so yeah and I mean it probably wouldn't make too much difference if you you know if you did name those as installation or whatever because you just make sure that you know your your setup phase is going to be before your installation phase and then your deployment phase and all those kind of things so you can you can kind of just name them so yeah that you might want to call installation and then you'd say okay now we know that that one's installation that's going to be or maybe the other way around set up yeah deployment yeah yeah well let's put this one deployment actually yeah yeah so I think um at the minute it's not sorting by sequence but that is something that we're aware of and something that we're going to be doing in the short answer yeah yeah that I mean that's and that's great though because it still gives you the ability to see um kind of you know really easily what you know what each of those those phases or or um you know Milestones actually mean so um you can then say okay well even if if and we can reorder them anyway as we saw but you could say you know anything that's in that falls under that deployment phase we're going to know is that's going to be done potentially after the installation phase um anyways or uh we might even want to add start date and Target dates from here in order to buy that yeah we've got a timeline uh there's a few options yeah no that's cool um now one of the feature that I wanted to mention another new addition to project management in Halo is uh a forecasting tab so the intentional forecasting tab as it apparently stands is a way for you to add in uh expected number of hours each week that the assigned agents for these tasks will be performing on this project and this is basically a means of making sure that you know the your risk you have sufficient resource to take on new projects at any given point in time and that's also an option that we enable within our type configuration again in our details tab we have this forecasting tab we enable that what we'll find is a forecast exam on our projects now the agents that we have in here will be the agents assigned to our respective tasks similar to our budgets we're not concerned about forecasting time on Project one two three four uh if Chris isn't actually working on that project at all we only want to see the people that will be working on the project yeah and so yeah as we as we start to allocate the resources to our project we can then come into our forecasting and specify an expected number of hours that James is going to be working on this particular project now at the minute um that's all it does uh this was added in very recently uh so it's not it doesn't tie back to any other functionality just yet but it is something that we're going to be proving on as sort of a phase two later on in the year they were going to consider is that our forecasting tab or our forecasting functionality is also available in the timesheets module so we've got forecasting option up here where we'll be able to see the total forecasted hours that any given agent has in any given week so of course you've got a project by project forecast and then you can come into your time sheets module and you can actually have a look at a high level how much time people are working on projects uh over the next you know month or so and similar to that we've also got this planning option that is again initially developed for our project management where we can have a look over a given span of Time how much availability a given agent has so I believe if we back date this we're having a look at time that's been locked in the system and if we're forward dating this then we're having a look at appointments that are in your Halo calendar for a given agent and the intention of the planning section and the forecasting section is as follows your planning section is a way for you to determine uh the resource that can be allocated to a new project so a new project comes in you know can we assign Morgan one or two of these tasks uh yes he doesn't have anything booked out for the next you know two three weeks called so that's about our allocation and then our forecasting is about the actual amount of time that we're going to be spending on the tasks that we have been assigned so planning is about who do we assign to forecasting is about how much time they're going to spend on what has been assigned hopefully that makes sense that that's yeah absolutely and and that's actually really good because a lot of a lot of the other tools that I'm seeing are on are not doing forecasting and planning as as well as as well as this is so um so I really I really like that that new feature cool yeah yeah and as I say that's a that's a V1 that was introduced a couple of months ago it's something that we're going to be improving on the relationship between the planning section and the forecasting section is something that I imagine will be uh enhancing but you know as with all of us used in Halo it's it's really you guys the community that helped Drive the product forward so yeah you know if you can see a way for us to make that functionality even better then you can head to ideas.hlo psa.com to add that as a suggestion in our open Community Forum or uh reach out to payload directly yeah absolutely and and or or you can leave a comment below and we'll we'll make sure we get that back to to uh Morgan and his team um and make sure that that gets um gets addressed so yeah no there's some definitely some some cool stuff around um around projects and just with that I guess so at the moment if you had an engineer that was was doing you know some of their some of their time as a as a service desk engineer and some of their time as a project engineer um is the forecasting going across the two where you can kind of say um you know I know that I can confidently pull this this person off the service desk um you know because I've got the capacity to be able to do that and if I pull him off there it's not going to affect anything we're doing on the service desk and kind of make him work more on projects and stuff like that is is the forecasting doing that level at the moment or I suppose it could do bear in mind that the forecasting is I mean that we enable within our ticket type configuration so if it's not enabled for incidents which it was not intended to be enabled for anyway then that would not apply no but for that example I would probably be using the planning section instead of the broadcasting section yes yeah so uh so if we're talking about the planning section then absolutely yeah um you what you would want to do is want to make sure that you have appointments in your calendar for the certain types of work that you're going to be doing uh you know you might you might block out two to four hours a day just as support and then you can use that planning section as an indicator of Okay so we've got our four hour support here uh Morgan's also got uh two appointments with two customers outside those four hours um tomorrow so he has very little availability tomorrow um so it's all based on uh appointments that are in the calendar so as long as that calendar is reflective of one's capacity at some point in the near future and the planning section should reflect that capacity and allow you to re-allocate resources program yeah okay all right that's worth yeah that's what having a a play with and uh and and setting up so you know if anyone wants to see that side of things more um you know in in more detail then you know obviously reach out to us through the various channels and um more than happy to kind of show you that stuff so sure one final point that I think I didn't mention when I was talking about milestones and Milestone dependencies is when we are updating the dates of our Milestones by default the dates of our dependent Milestones have also updated respectively now there is an option uh in our project management configuration that bypasses that and just updates all of the dates on all of those Milestones so if you did just want to shift the whole project and you know all of the all of the Milestones within that project backed by a month then you could have this enabled otherwise our shifting is just for those dependent milestones okay yeah that makes a lot of sense excellent well I think this has been a really really good session around um around kind of you know um you know milestones and and planning and and forecasting and that kind of thing and there's some really cool stuff in here so hopefully everybody's got some really good use out of this um we will be continuing a little bit around our project series as well we're going to be talking on the next video around um around kind of had a bill for these projects so you know how to do that fixed price billing if you've got five thousand dollars and you know how to kind of bill for that so we'll talk about that on the next video so you know and if you're getting any value out of these I would really appreciate it if you liked and subscribed and it does really help us to kind of keep doing these videos for you guys and um you know reach out to us if you need any help so I really appreciate it Morgan as always and I you know shout out to to Halo and thank you so much to Halo for letting us do these and letting us use your time um you know really is appreciated so thank you very much as always yes a pleasure um thanks very much see you on the next one thanks see you on the next one cheers