Project Workspace Overview

Overview

The Project workspace is the epicenter for all project information, communications, and collaborations for a specific project.

In a project workspace, your internal and external team members can:

• Track time and expenses against a project budget.
• Build Gantt charts.
• Create tasks, deliverables, and milestones in the Task Tracker.
• Invite team members, contractors, and clients to the project.
• Post messages and upload files in the Activity Feed.
• Share files and create private posts.
• See a financial summary of the project broken down by resource and top-level task.

There are two stages in a project:

• Estimate—This early stage of a project allows you to quickly and efficiently build a bottoms-up estimate that allows you to make accurate financial projections—such as building a task schedule, allocating roles to tasks, and estimating resource hours, costs, and margins—before any work on the project begins.
• Project—At this stage of the project, you already have your budget and staffing figured out and the work is ready to begin.

To learn more about project stages, see Project Stages Overview.

Project Workspace Header

From the header of the project workspace, you can—with the right permissions—update the project's status, change the project name, complete other actions for your project via the Actions menu, mute notifications from the project, or access the Project side panel.

When a project is in the Estimate stage, the text “Estimate” appears to the left of the project name.

Project Status

The project status is located to the right of the project name. It indicates which phase your project is currently in, and consists of a label and corresponding color to quickly communicate the current status to its members.

The project color and their corresponding statuses are:

• Gray—Not yet started
• Light Green—Close to starting
• Green—In progress
• Yellow—In progress with a pending action
• Red—In progress with a blocker or ended
• Blue—Finished

To change the project status, select the arrow next to the current status. In the drop-down menu, select the corresponding project color and then select an option from the list that appears.

Project Actions

The project Actions (“ ”) icon is located at the top of the project workspace next to your project name. Selecting the icon gives you access to the following menu options:

• Settings—This takes you to the Project Settings page where you can manage your project settings.
• Pulse Settings—This takes you to the Pulse Settings page where you can manage the project’s Pulse settings.
• Rates & Roles—This takes you to the Rates & Roles page where you can set roles and rates for each provider-side project participant.
• QuickBooks—This takes you to the project's QuickBooks Settings page where you can map customers, jobs, products, and services in QuickBooks to tasks.
• Project Permissions—This takes you to the Project Permissions page where you can set the project permissions for users invited to a project.
• Custom Fields—This opens the Custom Fields section of the Project side panel where you can view the Project Custom Fields previously created by Account Administrators in Settings > Custom Fields.
• Organizations—This opens the Organizations section of the Project side panel where you can select which organizations can access the project.
• Project History—This takes you to the Project History page where you can review project activity over the last 7 days.
• Move to Project Stage—This moves a project that is currently in the Estimate stage to the Project stage.
• Move to Estimate Stage—This moves a project that is currently in the Project stage to the Estimate stage.
• Save Activity Feed as PDF—This will email you a PDF of the project’s activity feed.
• Archive Project—This option will archive the project, which you will need to confirm in a modal that appears after you select this option.
• Unarchive Project—This option will make an archived project active again, and only appears as an option on archived projects.
• Leave project—This option allows you to leave a project, which you will need to confirm in a modal that appears after you select this option.

Project Side Panel

The Project side panel consists of several sections where you can view and/or edit project information. To access the side panel, click the Side Panel (“ ”) icon to the right of the Actions menu.

The side panel’s sections include the following:

• Project Header—The header contains the project name and a Go to project link that takes you to the Activity tab of the project workspace.
• Details—This section gives you access to important details about your project, such as status, dates, associated groups and clients, and the full description.
• Financial—This section is only available to members with View Financials project permissions (or higher); it shows you the project’s total budget, as well as the actual fees used, the EAC (Estimate at Completion), and the ETC (Estimate to Completion).
• Health—This section is only viewable to View Financials project permissions (or higher). Consultants with Edit Financials project permissions (or higher) can document details about the overall health of a project’s schedule, scope, budget, and client status.
• Custom Fields—This section displays all the Project Custom Fields (arranged alphanumerically) previously created by Account Administrators in Settings > Custom Fields.
  
  Tip: You can use Forms to display and edit only the custom fields that are relevant to the project, arranged in the way you want.
• Organizations—This section allows you to select which organizations can access this project.

For more information, see the Project Side Panel article.

Project Permission Tag

At the far right of the project workspace header, you may see a yellow tag that indicates your project permissions:

• View Only—Indicates you have a view only project permission: View Tasks, View Time and Expenses, or View Financials.
• Custom Access—Indicates you have a view only project permission and one or more additional access permissions.
• Viewing as Guest—Indicates you are not a member of the project and have Guest Access from an Access Group.

Project Workspace Tabs

The project workspace is broken up into separate tabs where you can manage different aspects of your project, such as completing or updating tasks, tracking your project progress, and organizing your resources. Depending on your permission, access levels, or enabled features, you may see some (or all) of the following tabs:

• Overview
• Activity
• Task Tracker
• Gantt
• Time & Expenses
• Resourcing
• Files
• Pulse
• Proofs

Overview Tab

The Overview tab shows you a financial summary of the project broken down by resource and top-level task.

To learn more, see the Project Overview Tab article.

Activity Tab

The Activity tab shows you a snapshot of recent communications, uploaded documents, and updates related to your project. Depending on your project permission level, you can also create project posts, invite users to a project, adjust project permissions, and complete tasks related to a project’s schedule and budget from the Project Admin box.

To learn more, see the Activity Tab Overview article.

Task Tracker Tab

The project Task Tracker is an interactive, visual representation of all the tasks, deliverables, issues, and milestones required to complete a project. It offers a variety of actions and customization options, which include the following:

• Establish task Start and Due dates.
• View or edit task Assignees.
• Customize views, filters, and columns.
• Export the Task Tracker data to a CSV format.

To learn more about the Task Tracker, see the Project Task Tracker article.

Expense Budgets Tab

Expense Budgets help you improve the accuracy of your project finances by letting you record costs—both planned and unexpected—independently of the project budget and seeing how they will impact margins. Expense budgets can be created and managed in the Expense Budgets tab.

To learn more about expense budgets, see the Expense Budgets article.

Gantt Chart Tab

Kantata's Gantt chart converts your project plan into a graphical representation of the entire project lifecycle.

The Gantt chart is divided into two sections: the tasks list on the left, and the schedule with a timeline on the right. Both sections offer a variety of actions and customization options, which include the following:

• Add or edit tasks.
• Establish dependencies between tasks.
• Create baselines to show how the scope of your project shifts over time.
• Export the Gantt chart to PDF or Excel format.
• Instantly view your project’s duration, budget, burn rate, and more.

To learn more about the Gantt chart, see the Gantt Chart Overview article. 

Time & Expenses Tab

On this tab, you can view the project’s timesheets, approve time, track time, and approve expenses for QuickBooks. You can also export your tracked time in a CSV or XLSX report, and add expenses to the project.

To learn more, see the Time & Expenses Overview article. 

Resourcing Tab

The Resourcing tab—which appears only for financial projects—allows project managers and resource managers to see both the team members assigned to a project and the resource plan in one place, as long as they:

• Are on the Provider-side of a project
• Have permissions to schedule hours
• Have one of the View permissions via the Resource Management Access Group set

To learn more, see the Resourcing in the Project Workspace article.

Files Tab

In the Files tab, you can see uploaded files and Google Drive docs. You can also preview supported file types, download or view a file in Google Drive, or open the linked task to provide feedback about the file.

To learn more, see the Project Files Tab article.

Pulse Tab

In the Pulse tab, you can see scores from Pulse surveys and drill into individual survey responses.

To learn more, see the Pulse in the Project Workspace article.

Proofs Tab

The Proofs tab lists all of the design assets and documents that have been added to the project. Each column can be sorted, and you can view or download an asset by clicking the corresponding icon in the Actions column.

For more information, see the Kantata OX Proofing article.

Adding Tabs to the Project Workspace

You can add both Forms and Insights dynamic dashboards as tabs within the project workspace.

Forms allow users to view and update project information. You can also leverage Forms to display a project's custom fields, arranged in the order you want.

Dynamic dashboards within a project allow you to stay aligned and quickly see data and important metrics related to your project.