At the heart of project management are three basic concepts: projects, tasks, and due dates. You can view this as a hierarchy:
- Projects (e.g. a wedding, a software version release, etc)
- Tasks that apply to each project (e.g. Flowers, Transportation, etc. in the case of weddings)
- Issues assigned to a project and task that may or may not have an explicit due date.
There are due dates at every level of this hierarchy, and they “trickle down”. So while the "Flowers" task may not have an explicit due date, the Jones-Smith Wedding most certainly does, so issues with this wedding and task have a due date, whether they explicitly specify one or not.
Enabling project management makes the project calendar available to users.
To enable project management:
- Navigate to the project.
- Select Admin > Settings.
- Select the checkbox to "Enable project management".
After enabling project management, three fields must be given values:
- Project field - This field determines how to group issues into projects.
- Due date field - This field determines the due date displayed for each issue in the project calendar.
- Task field - This field determines the sub-grouping of each task within a project
For example: Ginny is a wedding planner, using Squish to track her weddings this season. Since each wedding is an individual project, she chose the "Wedding" field as her project field. Squish tracks each value for that field as a different project, so that the "Smith-Gordon" and "Diaz-Sanders" weddings are separate. Ginny chose the "Wedding Date" field as her due date field, since this is the day all of the coordination must be completed by. She chose "Planning Step" as the task field. This allows her to categorize her issues by the task they belong to, such as issues belonging to the "Groom/Groomsmen Attire" task category might include: suit selection, first fitting, final fitting, or return suits after wedding.
Reminder settings:
Reminders can be sent to users by selecting the Send Reminders checkbox. Once selected, there are two other options available relating to reminders:
- Send reminders __ day(s) before issues are due - Here users can enter the number of days prior to the issue due date when reminders will be sent.
- Note: reminders are sent at 12:00am (midnight) Eastern Time.
- Send reminders for resolved issues - if selected, reminders for issues which have already been completed will still be sent to users.
Reminders are sent to whomever the issue is assigned to. Issues can be assigned to either individual users or to groups of users. This also allows groups of people to be notified on changes to issues.