Project Portfolio
Today you will learn...
Dialing in on the perfect set of Projects for regular project management workloads using Search, Groups, Filters, etc.
Saving Smart Views to save your & your teams' time
Tips & tricks for maximizing your personal & your teams' leverage with Play Mode
Reading time: 5 minutes
Dialing in on the perfect view
The Project Portfolio is where all your company's Projects live, or -- if you're not an Admin -- whatever Projects you have access to (see Roles).
It is typically the page that most browsers default to. If you don't land on the "Projects" page by default, click on the corresponding item in the left-sidebar menu.
Once you're on the Projects page, you have a variety of tools at your disposal, allowing you to hone in on the perfect list of projects, depending on your task at hand. Some common examples include:
10,000-foot overview of your pipeline of work-in-progress Projects (we will look at this example in more detail in the rest of this article)
Filtered pipeline of Projects in a particular city or state, and/or with a particular scope of work, e.g., "California Battery-only Projects"
Sub-pipeline of the Projects in the permitting phase, broken down by the status of the Work Order representing the filing of the AHJ permits
The possibilities are limited only by your task at hand & your creativity!
For the sake of this article, we're going to look at the example of a 10,000-foot overview of your pipeline of work-in-progress Projects.
Let's go ahead and unpack each of the tools available to you for honing in on a list of Projects of interest.
1. Search
This is the most intuitive & old but gold way of boiling down a list of Projects. You can search by:
Project Title
Project Number (coming soon)
Address
Primary Phone
Primary Email
Pro tip: Don't over-rely on text-based search. The best users & companies ask "How can I make my/my team's life easier by looking for common patterns here?" & then proceed to build out a Smart View using some of the more powerful & time-saving tools listed below. Read on!
2. Status
This one is also very intuitive. By default, only the "Active" and "On hold" Projects will be shown. You can also chose to display any combination of "Completed" and "Cancelled" Projects. See the main article on Projects for more info on working with Statuses.
We'll keep it as "Active" and "On hold" for the sake of our 10,000-foot view.
3. Archive
This toggle shows/hides archived Projects. Again, pretty self-explanatory. Read on for tips & tricks on bulk (un)archiving Projects.
As far as our 10,000-foot view goes, we'll only show projects that are not archived, i.e., leave the toggle in the "off" position.
4. Group by
This one is our personal favorite here at Coperniq. Grouping allows you to at-a-glance segment your Projects based on any standard or custom property, to quickly separate Projects into neat buckets, to make them easier to digest. Each group shows how many Projects it contains, and allows you to (un)collapse it for quicker navigation.
The possibilities here are endless. Some go-to groupings:
Particular Project Workflow: This will be the default 90% because it powerfully buckets your Projects by their respective Workflow Stage, giving you an overview of the full pipeline for a particular Workflow
"Trades" Standard Property: This allows you to segment your Projects by their scope of work in terms of solar-only, battery-only, solar & battery, etc.
Permit Work Order Status: As mentioned above, this allows you to group your Projects by whatever Status they are in, effectively creating a sub-pipeline for your permitting department
Again, for the sake of this article, we'll go with our "Resi - EPC - CA" Workflow, since we want a 10,000-foot view of our California residential EPC Projects.
5. Sort by
This is spreadsheets 101, except you can quickly sort by more than one Standard or Custom Property in ascending or descending order.
For example, you can sort by the "Project Manger" Standard Property (ascending), followed by the "Project Size" Standard Property (descending), which will show you all the Projects managed by a particular PM, starting with the largest Project first.
Aside from these, you can sort by any other Standard or Custom Property. Here are some highlights:
"Created at": This sorts by the date & time when a particular Project was created
"Last activity": This sorts by the date & time of the last user activity within a particular Project
"Time in stage": This is one of our favorite options to sort by, when coupled with a Workflow grouping, effectively giving you an aging report for each Stage, showing the Projects that have been in a particular Stage the longest/shortest
Today we'll be sorting by "Time in stage", since we're already grouping our Projects by a Workflow.
Pro tip: Top-performing teams & departments combine "Time in stage" sorting with Red & Yellow SLAs, in order to visually see all the "red" Projects followed by the "yellows", creating a powerful triage view.
6. Filters
You'll see a right-side panel slide-in by clicking on the "More" button. This is the Filter panel.
By clicking "+ ADD FILTER" (1) you can add a new Standard or Custom Property to filter by.
Using simple English phrases like "Project Manager is Elon Musk", you can easily add Filters, that will be easier for your team to understand. You can add multiple Filters (2, 3) and use "And" & "Or" operators (4) to construct more sophisticated combinations of Filters.
In the example above we filter by "Trades is any Storage AND Project Manager is Elon Musk", which gives us all of Elon's Projects that include battery storage.
Finally, you can close the Filter panel by clicking "CLOSE" (5).
7. Manage columns
Next, let's select the most useful Properties to show in our view. Once you click on "MANAGE" you'll see the following screen.
You can search for any Property (1) and also navigate to a particular Property Group (2). Then you can (un)check particular Properties (3). This will include or exclude them from the list on the right (4), where they can be dragged-and-dropped into the most useful order.
Make sure to hit "SAVE" (5) in order for your changes to apply.
Pro tip: If you're building a view for a particular team or department, as in our permitting example mentioned above, you can include Virtual Properties for a particular Work Order, let's say "AHJ permit process", such as "AHJ permit process created at", "AHJ permit process completed at", "AHJ permit process status", etc.
This will include those values for a particular Project, allowing you to build the most detailed view for the task at hand.
8. Show 10/20/50 Projects per group
This dropdown allows you to select how many Projects you'd like to see per group.
Pro tip: The best teams use 10 or 20, only leaving 50 for rare occasions. Instead they focus on having very specific filters, so that they're not using Coperniq like a glorified spreadsheet! 😉
9. Saving & sharing Smart Views
Once you build the perfect view for yourself or your team, you're going to want to save it for future reusability, so you don't have to go through the same steps 1 through 8 multiple times a day/week/month.
Clicking on "VIEWS" will show the list of all Smart Views available to you. In order to save the view, proceed by clicking on "+ Save smart view" under the list.
Then you'll see the following screen appear.
Here you'll be able to either save a new Smart View or replace an existing one (1). Next, you'll be able to pick an emoji (2) -- leave a comment below with your favorite emoji -- and give your Smart View a descriptive name (3).
Pro tip: Always try to use descriptive names that will be obvious to you and your team weeks & months after you originally create it. Consider using the following format: "<User or Team> - <Purpose> - <Additional details>", e.g., "Elon - Permitting - Texas".
Finally you'll need to choose the visibility of your Smart View. You can make it visible to
Everyone in your workspace
Only you
Select teams and/or roles
Pro tip: Be a good citizen and be mindful of your teammates when creating Smart Views visible to everyone. Make sure you're not polluting their digital work environment. At the same time, if you come up with an amazingly useful view that you know your team would benefit from, consider making it visible to them.
For the sake of our example, we'll make the Smart View visible to everyone in our workspace since its our Claifornia Residential EPC pipeline.
10. Quickly accessing Smart Views
Here's the best part: once you save a Smart View, you can access it with a single click from any page in the Platform. You can also search your Smart Views by typing into the "Search..." box under "Smart views" on your left-sidebar menu.
If you & your team invest some time into planning & constructing useful Smart Views, you'll gain great leverage & start saving a ton of time, gracefully & efficiently jumping from view to view!
Bulk actions
In Coperniq you can use Bulk Actions to update your Projects, saving you time updating records.
In order to do this you would do the following:
Click (checkmark) here:
Once you check the box you'll see this menu above the checkmark:
This menu includes the ability to: Bulk Edit, Email, SMS and Archiving.
Let's walk through how each works:
Bulk Edit:
You'll be presented with options in Bulk edit
Choose your option of what you want to Bulk Edit
As an example (Update Workflow) you'l be presented with the next menu where you'll make your options:
Click "Save" after you make your choice and the records will update.
For emails:
Click on the email envelope next to your selected count and you will be presented with this menu to make your options to email, when done hit "SEND".
For SMS:
Click on the SMS icon next to your selected count and you will be presented with this menu to make your options to SMS, when done hit "SEND".
For Archive:
Click on the trash can icon next to your selected count and you will be presented with a wsrning to make sure you want to do this. If ok, hit "Confirm"
NOTE: As with any bulk actions be careful, check what you are doing before you Save/Confirm
Play Mode
When reviewing a Project you can use "Play Mode" to move back and forward by using the arrows:
That's a wrap!
That's it for today folks. Now you're fully equipped to set up your first 2-3 smart views. The rule of thumb to keep in mind here is: "What are the top-3 most common questions I ask myself about my Projects?", and then try to express those questions in terms of sorting, grouping, filtering, etc. Good luck!
If you have any questions or would like more best practices on working with the Projects Portfolio & Smart Views, contact your customer success manager or support@coperniq.io.
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