Inside your agency, you'll likely have a way of delivering the work you do. But that knowledge might be in your head as a PM or across the agency as a collective. By documenting and committing your process to Outlign, you'll start to see a payoff that will enable your team to become more consistent, make fewer mistakes and keep clients happier.
A process project is best for a workflow that follows a sequence, where it's best if the work is done in a particular order. Here's how to create a process in Outlign (assuming you have a client already setup);
Hit 'Add a project'
Select 'Process Project' as your project type
Enter all the project details (name, description etc)
You will notice during the setup process that you can add an internal space. This gives you the ability to add either a task board or a process within the project just for your agency team and is hidden from your client. This enables a few benefits
The project manager can manage both the client communications and the agency workflow all from one space and view (which means you don't need to setup a separate project to organise the work on the agency side ...bonus!)
The PM can control who sees what. For example, if you want to invite your designer or developer to the agency side of the project, but not the client side that's possible with this feature.
It's less effort and clicking around when you join two workspaces together and that saves the mental and cognitive load. Hell yeah.
Tip: The Process and Phase type is ideal for large meaty projects whereas to-do lists are for those quick projects that don't need as much explanation or communication.
Once you've entered your project details, Outlign will create a home workspace and you can start to enter the next details for the project - which will be your project phases
It's now time to map out each phase of your project. This will depend on the type of creative project you're undertaking. You can edit, remove or add to your phase list at any time.
Example: If you're designing and developing a new brand, you may dice up your project into four core phases: Strategy, Concepts, Brand Design and Brand Guide. Each reflects a group of related work items;
Once you have created your phases, you can then add tasks within each phase. This allows for more specific details.
Select the phase
Hit 'new'
Give your task a title
Add task content
Tip: You might find it easier to write out all of your task in one go and then come back and add content for each step.
Example: A strategy phase might involve an overview (an education task), a Workshop task, followed by two rounds of strategy;
Each task includes longer-form content. This includes:
Message thread with inbuilt video, image and gif formatting (meaning you can copy and paste links directly into the editor).
Approval Feature that allows you to set a task to automatically fetch approval from the client
Modern editor with /command feature for richer content editing
Each step is automatically created as a draft. This gives you ample time to prepare step content without the client viewing in advance.
If you are not ready to publish the step, just 'save as a draft' and you can launch it later (the client won't see this)
Hit 'Publish' once you're ready to share your step and then select the people you'd like to receive an email notification
You can also publish without sharing, meaning the client can see the step and content but they won't get a notification when you publish
Make sure the right people on your crew and on your client's team have access to this project, to do this:
Navigate up to the team avatars in the right-hand corner
Click on 'Invite someone' — you can do this to add people from your internal team or tab across to the client team to invite clients
Note: Even if a member has been added to your agency team they will still need to be added to the individual project to see it.
