Blueprint in Zoho Projects: Adding life to your task's life cycle

Every task in your project has a life cycle—a series of stages it has to pass through from creation to completion. Manually moving tasks from one stage to another can be cumbersome, more so if many tasks in your project have a similar life cycle. Worse still, having to do it repeatedly can make even exciting tasks look mundane.

To add more life to your task life cycles, Zoho Projects introduces Blueprint. Build and save workflows that can be applied to all tasks or specific ones based on the criteria you set. With your tasks smoothly flowing from one stage to another, you can stop worrying about missing a step and concentrate on doing your tasks better. Read on to find out more about Blueprint, and other features that we have shipped to help you be more productive.

The canvas is set: You be the architect

In Zoho Projects, a clean and simple dot-paper-styled canvas makes you feel like an architect, as you drag and drop statuses and build your workflows. You can define transitions that will cause a task to move from one status to another.

For example, the marketing team at Zylker runs weekly social media campaigns to promote their business. To successfully mark the task as done, it has to go through several stages, like getting the content written and reviewed, designing images, and making videos. Their Social Media Blueprint makes sure none of these stages are bypassed, and that the task flows beautifully.

With more control comes more power: Set transition restrictions

While running a project is collaborative work, it’s necessary that each one has set roles and activities to take up. Any of the designers can take up the design, whereas an approval process may require managers. These conditions under “Before Transition” control who gets to do what. You can also set specific criteria that have to be satisfied before a task can move to the next stage.

Automated actions and messages: Don’t miss a thing

When a task moves from one status to another, this often means that significant development has taken place. When you have to document those changes or take actions based on them, little details can slip through the cracks. To save yourself the trouble of remembering the transitional details, configure them in your blueprint. Prompt for actions to be performed, or configure messages to be displayed when a transition is taking place. Once the transition is complete, you can also choose to update fields and send out email alerts.  

You can have common transitions, clone blueprints, and more. The task detail page will display necessary information like the available transitions, and also a quick preview of the blueprint. With stages and transitions set in place, watch your tasks flow through their life cycle, as smooth as ever.

Before you go, let me fill you in on a couple of other features that you can try out!

Money matters: Setting and tracking project budget

One of the most important phases of planning and project tracking is to fix the budget, whether it’s time or money, and to track its consumption along the way. Zoho Projects allows you to set up the budget and also monitors the planned cost against the actual cost, so that overruns can be reined in before they run wild. Read more here.

Going beyond the defaults: Custom status for projects

Zoho Projects brings custom status for projects. Create your own statuses based on the different stages of your project like Active, Survey phase, Research, and Approved. The project layout now supports sections, to group your fields into categories.

Better your project management experience by enabling the above features, and don’t forget to leave your comments!