Project Stages Overview

Available in: All Plans
Project Permissions: Project Administrator, Edit Financials
Default Account Permissions: Account Administrator, Report Viewer with Cost, Report Viewer, Project Lead, Project Creator

Overview

There are two stages in a project, the Estimate stage and the Project stage. You can indicate which stage a project is at during project creation or move an active project to a different stage at any time.

You can choose to include or exclude based on the project’s stage in the following areas of the app:

• Resource Center
• Project List
• Insights reports and dashboards

Estimate Stage

This early stage of a project allows you to quickly and efficiently build a bottoms-up estimate for your clients—which involves building a task schedule, allocating roles to tasks, and estimating resource hours, costs, and margins—before any work on the project begins. You can complete all of this work using the same tools that are available for building a project during the Project stage.

From the Task Tracker, you can quickly apply templates, add resources and their scheduled hours, create allocations from the resource estimated hours, and enter any other pertinent details that you need during the Estimate stage of a project.

As you make changes to the estimate, you can see how your estimated fees, costs, margin, and more are affected in the Overview tab.

When the estimate is complete, you can take a snapshot to capture the original plan for future reference and comparison. The current financials, hours, timeline, and other information will be saved.

Estimate Stage Differences

When the project is in the Estimate stage, you will notice the following differences.

• In the Summary Bar, the following options and information are available:
  • Update Estimates (“   ”) button—Quickly update all task budgets and/or task estimated hours based on resource estimated hours and bill rates.
  • Create Allocations from Estimated Hours (“   ”) button—Quickly create soft allocations for all resources by using resource estimated hours entered on tasks.
  • Select Rate Card menu—Quickly change the project rate card to see how it impacts financials. During the Project stage, the rate card can be changed via Project Settings.
    
  • In the Overview tab, a triangle icon appears beside the rate card drop-down menu in the Summary Bar to indicate that the estimated fees in the tables are calculated with multiple rate card versions.
    
  • In the Resource Center and the Resourcing tab of a project, estimate-stage projects are filtered out by default.
  • When accessing the project, the Overview tab loads by default instead of the Activity tab.
  • In the project header, an Estimate tag appears beside the project name.
    
  • In the Task Tracker, a yellow dot appears in the Task Budget column to indicate that the task budget is not equal to the estimated fees.
    

Project Stage

At this stage of the project, you already have your budget and staffing figured out and the work is ready to begin. If your project was built out in Kantata OX in the Estimate stage, you can update the project from the Estimate stage to the Project stage without having to duplicate any work effort.

How to Start a Project in the Estimates Stage

1. In the left navigation, hover over Projects and select Add New (“   ”).
2. On the Create a New Project page, enter the Project Name, then select Start Project in Estimate Stage.
   
3. Fill out all relevant fields for your project in the remaining sections, then select Create Project in the top-right corner of the page.

How to Move an Existing Project to a Different Stage

Users with Edit Financials permissions or higher can move the project to a different stage at any time.

1. Go to the project that you want to update.

2. In the project header, select the Actions (“   ”) icon and select one of the following options:

   • Move to Estimate Stage
   • Move to Project Stage

   The project updates to the appropriate stage.

   

   Note: The project can also be moved to the Project stage from the Summary Bar by clicking Start Project.

Stage vs Status

With the stage, you can:

• Select between two possible values—estimate or project—to indicate whether a project is in estimation or not.
• Set the stage when first creating the project and change the stage via the Project Settings menu or the Summary Bar.
• Leverage the functionality and project information only available in the estimate stage, as detailed in the Differences section.

With the status—which does not change how the project behaves or what information it displays—you can:

• Provide more detail about how exactly the project is doing or where exactly in either stage the project is in.
• Select from 6 status colors and a total of 79 statuses.
  Note: Some statuses appear in multiple categories—for example, there is both a Gray and Light Green Contingent status.
• Set the project status using the status menu in the project header or using bulk actions in the Project List.

You can choose any combination of stage and status to communicate the project status and phase. During the estimate stage, statuses in the Grey category may make the most sense, such as Bid Stage, Pipeline, etc. Note that there is a Grey Estimate status; this has nothing to do with the stage.

You may choose to use certain statuses whether a project is in the estimate stage or not. For instance, the Yellow At Risk status may be possible during estimation or during delivery.

How you choose to leverage and combine the stage and status depends entirely on your organization’s unique processes.

For more information about statuses, see the Project Status article.