Redbooth Tips: Organizing for Project Management Effectiveness

One of the questions I get most frequently in our Redbooth new user webinars is how to best organize Redbooth organizations, projects and tasks. It’s important to get your basic structure set up in a way that it can seamlessly grow as your teams and projects grow over time. I’m going to take you through how I setup my own projects in Redbooth, so you can see some best practices first-hand.

Your organizational framework within Redbooth consists of the following elements:

1. Organization
2. Projects
3. Task Lists
4. Tasks
5. Subtasks

Setting up Your Organization

The first element you will customize when setting up your Redbooth desktop is your Organization. This is the overarching element under which all of your activities will take place. It will include all of the people within your company that use a single Redbooth account.

For most users, the organization is setup as their company name.

Structuring Projects

Projects are your primary tool for organizing collaboration between smaller groups of people within your organization, and in support of specific initiatives. Some Organizations choose to organize their projects by departments, with separate projects and project teams for sales, IT, operations, marketing, customer support, etc. Others choose to use projects for organizing by specific business project types, such as budgeting, product roadmap, advertising campaigns, customer referrals, etc.

To decide which approach works best for you, think through the type of collaborative work in which your organization is most often engaged. Are projects typically limited in scope to a specific department, or are they more frequently cross-company in nature? Are projects worked on exclusively with in-house teams, or are there projects that involve third party individuals who don’t need access to everything a team is working on?

For example, if you’re a freelancer or a consultant that works with lots of different clients, I recommend setting up one project for each client. With that type of project structure, only the people who you invite to be members of that specific project can see the tasks, notes and conversations associated with it.

Creating an Effective Naming Convention for Projects

Before creating your first project, take some time to think through how you will be using the platform. Will users be members of multiple projects? Will there be a number of similar projects going on at the same time? The project name you input will not only show up on project members dashboards, it will also show up in the subject lines of any notification emails they receive.

Lets go back to our freelancer example. If she is working independently on specific, concurrent projects for each client, naming each project after the client’s company name, and creating a task list (more on this later) for each individual deliverable is a good strategy. However, if she is working on two separate large projects for the client, with distinct working teams, it may be a better fit to name the projects after the client and the topic, so notifications can be more easily managed.

Managing Tasks through Task Lists

Now that you have your projects set up, you’re ready to dive in to tasks. If you have a simple to do item, you may need to only create a single task, assign it to a specific person, set a due date and move on. To easily link similar tasks across projects, you can include a hashtag in the task title. This will allow users to click through and see related tasks at a glance. You can additionally prioritize tasks by adding a priority hashtag of #P1, #p2 etc. to the title. Tasks marked #p1 will be flagged as urgent within Redbooth, giving them extra visibility to the team members.

For more complicated activities, involving multiple deliverables and team members, you will want to create a task list that houses a series of related tasks, each of which can be assigned to its own responsible person and due date. Additionally, to save time and ensure consistency of execution, you can create task list templates for your frequently recurring tasks. Task list templates are especially well-suited for replicating checklists, evaluation questions, process documentation, and workflows.

Next Steps

To learn more about optimizing your Redbooth experience, check out this archive from our recent Redbooth update webinar.