Halo Implementation Series – Project management

hey everyone welcome to another uh video in the implementation series of Halo today again I have with me my good friend Morgan from uh from Halo um he as as you've heard me mention on every other video and I know this is gonna um uh be a good thing for him is he's Mr Halo um you know Morgan knows everything there is to know about um about Halo and I really appreciate that Halo has let me um you know borrow Morgan again to kind of go through making some of these videos with me so today we're going to talk about projects um we're gonna kind of you know potentially go over three two or three videos talking about um you know everything there is to know about projects right from creating the ticket template um you know then going into um uh you know adding a project from a sales order into Milestones all that kind of stuff so um these may be fairly long videos but stick with us um and uh and we go from there so Morgan uh thank you very much for being with me I really appreciate your time again yeah thanks for having me Chris um Mr Halo himself it's been months even saying that and I'm still not tired of it so and I don't think I ever will be I love it exactly I'm gonna scratch your head from here you got such a big head now saying that yeah I'm not gonna be able to get out of this room um yeah now as you say uh we'll we'll do a few videos on projects and there's various different areas uh to cover here and we can really sort of break them down into three main aspects I suppose so we're gonna firstly we're gonna talk about creating projects and then we're going to talk about tracking projects that's going to include looking at our forecasting our Milestones our budgets Etc and then we can have a look at billing for projects and how we sort of uh bring the the sort of sales flow and sales orders into the conversation uh of products but yeah a great place to start of course is the creation projects themselves and so we'll we'll cover two aspects of that in this video um we'll start off just by looking at creating projects uh you know from scratch then we'll look at how we can apply a sort of General uh backbone to a project structure via the application of something called ticket templates um cool so I suppose a great place to start here is to actually go into the projects module right um so let's click into that and uh really when we're thinking about projects in Halo PSA um the first thing that what you want to come to mind is the concept of parent-child relationships for tickets so what I mean by that is uh broadly speaking a project is going to be composed of a a project ticket that's going to be allocated to the product manager where they can track budgets timelines resource allocation all of all of that stuff and that'd be the parent ticket and then underneath that will be a series of project tasks that will be assigned to individual members of the project team as a whole um and each of those tasks will be regarding some specific piece of work that's going to be required to complete the product on a whole and so when you when you spin a trial up you'll find some some configuration sort of baked in to handle this scenario so uh what we'll do is we'll start off just by creating a project um and we'll do that by clicking new in the top right of our projects area where by default we've got our tickets like service projects which so I'm not going to worry about the the budgets just yet we will cover those uh in an upcoming session as mentioned and but for for this video what I want to highlight is how within our project ticket type we have the ability up here to create a task um so you know maybe if I actually just give this some more meaningful information maybe I want to say like uh server migration let's say it's a server migration project um now the server migration projects might be composed of um backing up the old server uh decommissioning the old server and uh you know uploading the backup to the news about that so if I could just those could be thought of as pre-tasks right so click create task at the top here and that's opened up the the new task screen the new ticket screen on the right hand side where I might want to say decommission old service so with the tasks the project tasks um Morgan these are these are basically essentially just tickets right so these are the same as you would get in a um you know just in a normal service desk ticket but just kind of specifically related to a project yeah yeah exactly um the the sort of the fundamental logic as you say is yeah these These are tickets um they are tickets of a certain type uh namely projects and project tasks and um they are also tickets to a certain use uh namely projects so uh we'll take a look at what that means in just a moment but there is some special configuration specific to uh tickets of used projects but before I do that let me just go ahead and create this task this Mission old server and I think this would be familiar to most um users or you know people coming over from other PSA tools because they they kind of call them the exact same thing so yeah right a project task is effectively a ticket but a ticket specifically um with with certain criteria that that kind of links into a project and has other things it can do that a normal ticket can't but for all intents and purposes um it's it's a ticket but it's a project ticket yeah exactly um cool yeah so let me just set my my start date and my uh Target date my end date for this particular task to submit that and then what we'll find is uh we'll have a tasks tab pop up on our project where we can see uh the task that we've just created now of course in this case we've only got the one task but you can imagine an actual project may have you know 20 30 tasks against him um so yeah let's just take a quick step back and let me further answer that question that you had there about um whether these are just tickets or not so what I mean by the fact they are tickets to a certain type is if we were to go to configuration tickets ticket types we'll see in here that project and project tasks are in our list just like our incidents and our problems and our change requests are um what is different uh yeah of course one thing that's different is the field list we're capturing different bits of information for our project that we're not concerned with when we're talking about incidents like you know uh SLA priority for example is not going to be applicable for a project the the budgets will be so obviously we've got that defined field list but what we also have in our details tab is this use section so this use section of projects uh provides us with some special configuration specific to project management in Hobo PSA and one of one of those uh what one of those features is the the budgets functionality again something that we will cover in an upcoming session um another fairly important point I suppose when talking about the use of a ticket type we'll remember way back when we were having a look at our organization Center and specifically our team configuration we'll see that teams have uh are used for tickets used for projects and used for CRM so uh those ticket types that have use of projects you know we can refer to those as project types if the team that you have configured is not marked as user projects then tickets of use project in this case projects and project tasks cannot be assigned to any of the first line support team and now of course an agent can be a member of the first line support team and the projects team but they will those tickets will only be able to be assigned to the projects team and the Agents within those so another another handy point to keep in mind and and that makes sense because typically you would not necessarily need your First Alliance podcast work on on Project tickets but you may have a dedicated project team that is is is going to be able to work on on tickets and then there may be the same person but maybe you know while you're doing your your first line support roles you you may have a split role or something and then you'd you'd you'd kind of do projects as part of that so yeah so that makes perfect sense um uh you know allowing it only to be visible and and assigned to on a specific team yes yeah cool um yeah so I mean that's the um that's the premise of how we're working on on projects and that that is the the very uh broad structure of of how projects are composed in Halo PSA we've got a parent project ticket and we have a series of child tasks now of course um you can add the create task option into your project task so we could add uh create tasks in here or perhaps create sub tasks and we can have multiple layers so we can't have grandchildren as well uh that's that's not something that's uncommon um but again the logic is the same you have your your parent ticket your top level uh parent or grandparent ticket that's going to be allocated to the project managers where they're going to be tracking the the uh the forecasting the resource allocation and the budgets and then the actual day-to-day activity that's performed in order to drive the project towards completion will be done uh via our individual project tasks um and when we when we take a look at tracking projects we're going to see all sorts of different mechanisms available in Halo PSA to allow PMS to see how far along the journey or how far towards completion is a Project based on the status of our individual tasks or the amount of times been allocated to them uh the budgeted time and so on but you know um let's not put the carton for the horse yeah so uh yeah as I mentioned we've got parent projects and child tasks now what I just did there is I created one task against uh the project that wasn't very labor intensive um but you can imagine for I mean there's going to be way more tasks for a certain migration you can imagine a larger project um may have north of 40 tasks against it and for the most part those tasks are going to follow a very similar format right um you know if you're migrating a server the chances are you're always going to be decommissioning the old server you know or 90 of the time you're going to be decommissioning the old server so um we can at least to some extent um consider certain types of projects as following a template uh having a similar backbone structure to them which of course will diverge slightly from one project to the next but you know for that 80 85 of tasks that are going to be created they will be the same task or they'll have similar details against um and that's where ticket templates come in in Halo PSA so uh ticket templates allow you to create tickets in Halo with some predefined information allocated to them so let's go and take a look at our ticket template configuration and this is the same again so for that we'll go to the configuration module sorry Chris no sorry I was going to say um I think there's a bit of a delay on on our online which is fine this is um everything you mentioned here is is pretty much going to be very very familiar I think to anyone that's coming over from another PSA tool because you know project templates are are big things in in the other PSA tools out there you know we're exactly the same thing right you create all of those tasks that you're going to need on that particular type of project so always going to decommission a server always going to you know reinstall the operating system always going to plug in a drive whatever it is you you know you're always going to do those steps um and like you say you don't want to have to go manually and create those tasks every single time if they're always going to be the same um so so I think yeah the the concept of of templates especially anyone who's come from you know one of the one of the big two um other PSA tools should be fairly familiar with how um how and why you need to have um have templates so but yeah it's good to it's good to see how we do that in Halo yes yeah yeah absolutely and yeah so those those are found in uh the tickets area of configuration where we have our templates module now it's worth noting the template ticket templates more generally speaking can can be applied to any ticket type um so you know we we might have a um an onboarding ticket type a new startup ticket type that's actually got a series of tasks against it now that might not be considered a project that might be considered a service request but you're still going to have a series of tasks created um Associated to that service request to you know create the user and all of that stuff so um our templates can be applied to all ticket types but they are very useful for projects for the exact reason that Chris just mentioned so I actually use templates just in in ordinary tickets as well right so I because I I have my Consulting ticket that is always the same it always has the same information in it always has the same fields that need to be filled in and you know again I don't want to have to create that ticket and fill all that stuff in every single time I create the ticket so I just built a template that you know when I go into that particular type of ticket in my case Consulting it then pre-fills in all that information for me so um I don't have to type it in yeah cool cool okay cool so um let's go ahead and create a new template I don't think we've got a server migration in here so let's create a server migration template so firstly we'll give it a name now the values tab of our ticket template is where we actually predefine that information that is going to be used when this template is applied so um I'll go to the values tab we'll see in here this is where we have all of those fields that we can preset right so I want to to have this tickets like the a project so I can just make a project uh I can predefine a summary uh worth noting as well that dollar variables can be used in here so I might want to put the dollar area variable in which will return the customer name and just say server buying ratio and then we'll do the same thing in our details allocate status assign it to a team and particular potentially an agent I'll leave it as unassigned for now um and then some more miscellaneous information below you know do we want to set a default category in this case do we want to apply default workflows set up an approval um all of that good stuff now uh next up before we go on to the children tab let's just have a quick look at our to-do list so to-do lists are just check boxes that need to be checked off um in order to close the ticket so this can be quite handy just as uh you know make sure that you you follow these steps when you are decommissioning the old server for example or if you are um you know restoring the backup onto the new server make sure you've done X Y and Z if you are backing up the old server make sure that you've done XYZ so they're um they're quite handy ways of just providing a checkbox list um of small items that need to be completed in order to close the ticket now that in order to close the ticket Point comes with a slight asterisk because that is contingent on an option in the general ticket settings so if you go to config tickets General we have here whether or not we're going to enforce those to-do list items to be completed um when before closing a ticket so um it's up to you how you go forward with it I mean you can put those to-do list items on there as a subtle reminder um but if you don't necessarily want them to to enforce you don't want to enforce agents to collect those then you don't have to I would probably if I was going to use this to do this I would probably enforce my my team to make sure they're all uh clicked because what's quite nice as well is those clicks are all audited in the database meaning if if I say that X Y and Z needs to be done on a task the agent can't close the task until they have clicked X Y and Z and we can see that those big Blitz and then of course if the corresponding work hasn't been done you can follow up with your team as to why why it hasn't or if there was some confusion or whatever so um yeah it's just sort of aiding towards that accountability and making sure that your projects are Watertown yeah and it's interesting that you say that because um it's you know I do the same thing and um uh and every MSP I speak to when I you know when I do Consulting is to say you know you you should have checklists even on the most basic of tasks that people have done a a thousand times because we're all human and we're all going to forget right so it's it's always that good thing to go yep I've actually done that yes I have reset the password yes I have done the 2fa yes I have done all these things even though I've done it a million times we all get busy and it's it's so easy to forget and I think a lot of people that I speak to say well I don't need it on that kind of task because we do it 100 million times and um but then you know then you ask them the next question of okay well have you ever forgotten to do that task and the answer is very often yes we have I'm like okay well that's the reason you should be then putting in a to-do list so that's even even if you've done it a million times you can still tick to say you've done it which reminds you and as you say it's then audited as well so exactly exactly and then was talking about something security related you know all it takes is one mistake and you can have some serious problems uh and yeah I I get it I it's exactly the same internally in Halo um we we've got to-do lists for our projects and uh it's really annoying because you know it's oh I've already done this why do I have to check this but that drills into your mind that you have to do it um and if they weren't there then like you say uh I I'm speaking for myself I certainly would have forgotten to do some uh core aspects of uh you know of an implementation um so yeah it's a nice it's a nice subtle reminder of exactly what needs to be done and making sure that that's interactive as well uh by you know prompting the checking of those items so um not so important for the project but let's just put a couple of serious items in here uh let's say review timeline with customer uh get sign off yeah get customized now what's also quite nice with these is um you can imagine that uh you might have a uh well a server migration right um and a lot of those tasks you know reviewing the timeline is going to be applicable for everyone but there might be some checklist items that are only applicable to certain customers that have certain server configurations so we can actually make our to-do lists dynamically visible based on the customer that the the ticket or template is being raised for so that's quite a nice one as well this this is something that uh before this was implemented this came up all the time it was like well yeah okay we've got a bunch of to Do's that we want to make sure our agents are completing but those to-do's are subtly different from One customer to the next how can we handle that um and this is how you handle that now by adding your customer uh restrictions in so namely this to-do list item would only be visible uh if the ticket was logged the wrong line works yeah and this would be this is especially for our friends you know in in the US who deal with a lot of kind of medical you know over here we we mainly have the NHS and and things like that but you know when you've got doctors and dentists and what have you that they're dealing with um there may be specific um you know security things that they have to check being being then into Medical Practice which they wouldn't have to check if it was a um you know a marketing company or an HR company or something like that so that's where this is really going to come in in handy by saying okay these these sets of customers we absolutely have to make sure that this is ticked off so um now we get on to uh why ticket templates are so useful for projects um and that is via the children's tablet so not only can our ticket templates free to find the information on one ticket we can actually have a series of child tickets that are automatically created with predefined information on them as well um so let's have a look at how we how we achieve something like that so on our children tab we've got a table of contents this table will be filled out with a list namely a list of uh child tickets so let's add in here a new child template and let's call this one decommissioned old server now again we see the same tabs that we just saw a moment ago and we've got our values tab where we're specifying the information against this ticket that's being logged now this time we don't want to raise a project but instead we want to raise a project task and then we'll just call that d uh we'll do dollar area so now one thing that I wanted to mention um that I I'm quite a big fan of I haven't seen used uh widely enough in my opinion um is you can actually attach knowledge-based articles to your templates so you know you might have a KB article on the general procedure to follow when decommissioning an old server that gives an outline of you know step by step what you need to do and what you need to check for it and you know any sort of common errors anything like that so you can create your KBS and then attach your KVs to these templates so uh yeah that's quite a handy little point that I wanted to mention that just the question and I've been asked this before and so it'll be useful to get your take on this is are those available if you've got your KB articles in a third-party documentation tool those are not going to link to that too although you could probably put a link to it inside this article to their third party yeah yeah um unfortunately not we're we're working on um maybe thinking from documentation platforms to Halo but currently the articles that you saw on that list are Halo KB articles but again you're absolutely correct you can put a link in here um so we could say like click here for um related document in it glue or something um yeah and then you can just highlight that and insert our link here yeah yeah yeah and and actually that's um although the nowadays obviously all the task has the integration with rt glue so that's available using it glue stuff directly in in order sure because they obviously own on their product but but it actually wasn't like that until very recently where it had to be exactly the same as this even with rt glue you had to build the document in a you know in all the tasks and then link it into um sorry I didn't mean to bring in all the tasks into it no I think but it it you know it's just because people are coming in from those tools and and wanting to know this stuff and it's I don't know this is the way no no I mean but like yeah don't uh I I think everyone here watching uh knows the other big PSA vendors in the space and um it's it's quite important to make sure that while we're going through this series um people watching this have an understanding of the things that do align and don't align you know the naming conventions that that work very well in the naming conventions that uh you know need to be shifted so like you know when we were looking at ticket types versus ticket categories and Halo that's a great example of you know making sure that people have a solid understanding of the fact that they are totally different they're almost the opposite in Halo than they are in Auto task um so yeah it's important to make sure that people have an understanding of how the different tools um are similar and different in their own uh regards yeah yeah cool anyway uh we'll carry on so uh this time I'll pick my team to be product Consultants uh we'll leave that as unassigned save this and just for the sake of time keeping I'm just going to create one more task but of course you can imagine creating uh many tasks in here and and I'll touch on that in just a moment but yeah before we do that let's say decommission an old server and let's say um restore backup so give that the name again we'll make our value uh we'll we'll make our ticket type sorry project task project Consultants and then I might want to put um some to-do's specific to our restore backup on new servers so of course we can put to-do's on each on both the parent project and each of the individual children respectively um so you've got a unique list of things that need to be done or need to be checked off um based on whatever it is that you're doing so uh make sure backup file friends first synthesis in the old days you would have said make sure you put the tape into the uh into the tape drive before you do the restore that's uh yeah I'll spoke all my time before your time mate cool um yeah and now the reason the reason that I wanted to to create two here was just to to highlight um one final Point uh but an important Point nonetheless of our ticket type configuration ticket template sorry configuration uh primarily uh useful to to projects and that is um you know so we've got we've understood the concept of using these templates to predefined information for the project and for a number of tasks um but what you we people probably want in practice is uh tasks to be created at certain times right they don't want every task to be created at the same time or maybe they do but you know let's say they don't let's say that you want your restore backup on new server to only be created after the decommissioned old server is being closed off so by doing this we can sort of start to build a procedure for the project via our template application um we can start to think about you know what what is contingent on these tasks being created and so what conditions need to be satisfied for these tasks to be created maybe some other tasks need to be closed off or maybe some other tasks you know some other condition needs to be met so we can do that by adding to our rules so we see a column here we've got number of rules so I can add in Here and Now what we have at this point is a number of different conditions so uh the the top condition there is sort of the example that I'm talking about where we're saying only raise our restore backup on new server task when our decommission old task has been closed off now that's interesting maybe I need to say first let's go yeah sorry yeah just because I hadn't saved yet he didn't know that that uh actually existed so uh after we saved then we can add our creation so um yeah saying here that we we need to uh ensure that a particular task is closed uh before uh restore backup on new server is is created and then we can pick our decommissioned old server um we'll see here we've got a series of other options so it might be after some given time has elapsed it might be after a particular action has been performed um after the status has changed or perhaps even based on the values of some single or multi-select custom Fields so you can get really creative in terms of defining exactly what needs to happen in your project for each individual task or set of tasks to be raised and so you can start to sort of think about um creating not necessarily on Milestones but we could call them Milestones or we could call them phases of our project via the application of these rules where we have a set of tasks raised and then all of those tasks need to be closed off and once they're all closed off then another set of tasks are raised and so on and so forth um or we can have tasks created on single or multi-select options this is quite a nice one um but maybe we'll come back to where perhaps we want um so yeah perhaps we we have a check box on our project that says project admin required and if that checkbox is checked then a project admin task is created so we might come back to that when we start taking a look at some more sort of start to end examples of tracking projects from Halo but yeah for now and just know that these rules are here they're very they're very powerful mechanism allowing you to determine when particular tasks are raised from certain projects cool so that's that's the creation of our ticket templates and finally let's have a look at how we actually apply them to our tickets so there's there are various different ways to apply our templates um to keep this video as short as possible I'm just going to talk about one to start with um and that is going to be applying a template from the new ticket screen so we'll go back to our projects area we'll click new and we'll see at the top here we have our apply a template option um where in here we have our server migration template that we've just created so I'll click on that and I'll use that and notice how the information that we've defined namely the summary and details and ticket type have all been preset for us submit that and we're going to see that our project has been created um with our to-do lists automatically added in um and not only that but the task will also well the yeah the one task that we didn't have any creation rules for will be automatically created for us so we see one task in here decommission old server and then I can go in here uh notice again how our predefined information has come in with our link to our our document in this case it's a link to Google but of course you can put your own links in um and then when we close this off and go back to our parent namely back to our project and then your other task appears at that point we're going to see that second task has been automatically created for us yeah and that's nice because actually on on the other um or some of the other PSA tools all the tasks get created at the same time and then you you kind of have dependency tasks where you can say you know this one we we can't start this task until the one above has been completed um but they all get created at the same time um so this is kind of quite nice that you know we're not even gonna we're not even gonna be able to see that task um for the for the restoring backup until we've dealt it because we don't need to see it at that point yeah yeah absolutely um I suppose it is worth mentioning that that scenario for for the individuals coming from uh other PSA platforms that are looking to keep that uh functionality Halo can handle that as well um if we go back to our template yeah if we just don't set that um that rule then it'll just show them both at the same time well no sorry so what I was going to say is um what we've done there is we've applied a creation rule which means the the restore backup did not exist until the decommissioned old server was closed off um which I like but I appreciate the people coming from from other tools um have different ways of working and they don't want to lose that functionality perhaps so what I wanted to highlight was that within our template uh value tab we have this checkbox creating a read-only state so if we check this what we can then do within our creation well what we can then do within our rules is instead of making our order creation rule we can make it an unlock rule now again do that based on the closing of the decommission being old server and and also want to make sure that that is removed there we go um and so what that will do is that will create both tasks at the same time uh so you know people are more that that's more familiar with other tools and um also I suppose the flip side of that is people will be able to see the full set of tasks that do need to be completed eventually it's just nothing can happen on them until some condition is met it's like like what you're referring to with these dependencies um but by um using an unlock rule instead of creation rule what we find is both of those tasks are going to be created for us however the second task the um restore to new server will not allow us to perform any actions on that task so we see here now both have been created at the same time but in our restore backup task we're not going to have the ability at the top to perform any actions because the conditions that we're referring to have not yet been there so you know and as of everything in Halo there's a configuration option for it uh so whichever way it is you'd rather work uh the chances are Halo is going to be able to work for you and this is nice this is the way I would work because for me I want to see all of the tasks I want to be able to to kind of say you know um because I know what then is coming up I don't want to kind of get a surprise and something oh now I've got to do that task I'd rather kind of see them all but like this yeah there's no point me going to restore the backup on the new server if I haven't decommissioned the old one and indeed I haven't installed the new server um but I still want to know that it's coming up and I want to know that you know when it's coming up so I can kind of make some plans and um you know make sure I'm I've got the resources available to do that so cool that's really cool yeah there's some really cool um really cool options in there yeah brilliant and I think um I think that's a good point to wrap up here uh obviously there's plenty more to talk about in projects um but for the sake of keeping the video uh to a sensible length um yeah we'll wrap this up here this this should give you uh some insight into how you can use these ticket templates uh to create your your fundamental project structure for the different types of projects that you're doing on a repeat basis um and we've seen how we can template both parent project template all of the tasks how we can apply to-do lists to uh projects and to individual tasks and how we can apply creation or unlock rules to our tasks to determine uh what work needs to be done with yeah absolutely and I think you're right this is a a really good cool place to to end this and the purpose of these videos is not to not to kind of go into huge massive detail but just to give a you know a higher level overview of how these things work um and if you know if anyone wants to know more information about you know what else we can do with projects and then by all means reach out to me or reach out to to Morgan or somebody at Halo who who would have they'd be happy to help and what we're going to do on the next video is we're going to talk about um you know how this project creation happens um from uh you know from doing a quote and then kind of having a sales order and then kind of generating this project from um from that process so um thank you very much Morgan really appreciate you being on these videos again as always and I really appreciate um you know Halo allowing us to do these and allowing us to use so much of your valuable times to really appreciate it and uh thank you very much and we'll see you on the next video yeah thank you for having me it's always a pleasure and uh thanks everyone for watching so yeah see you on the next one where we we take a look at a different way of creating projects thanks cheers thank you