Even WEBRIS, who worked for years to perfect their approach, still leans on work that happens outside of Sheets. You might think that you can build the perfect, beautifully-automated project management suite for your agency. Don’t be afraid to go beyond the spreadsheet Google Apps script can be used to build out these triggers (called onEdit triggers) – and we used them heavily in the WEBRIS SEO project management suite.Ĥ.
Within Sheets, this often means populating a different tab on certain triggers – like when an article or deliverable is ready for review by an editor. Your team’s work is never done in isolation – there’s always a next step, and someone who needs to know about it. To automate reporting, you can use that same importrange function to pull data back *into* your hub.Īs one example, this ‘Pulse’ tab from the WEBRIS project management hub reports on link building campaign data from a separate workflow Sheet:Īny project management process is, er, a process. Say you have 2 Sheets for separate workflows – content production and outreach, in the case of the WEBRIS project management process. Looking at agency-wide stats requires pulling all your data together *somewhere*. This let’s you do critical stuff like populating consistent dropdown menus everywhere – keeping your data nice and clean.
Using the importrange function, you can then push those options out to all of the other Sheets in your project management suite. You’ll need one master Sheet to hold on to all of your settings – important agency-level info like your list of clients. This is critical for two reasons: To keep data clean Though you’ll need a village of Sheets, only one can be mayor. The content team didn’t have to waste time wading through tasks that didn’t concern them, they could focus explicitly on what the needed to do each day.Ī screenshot of the “Tasks” tab in the Central tracker Splitting up the Sheets files helped keep internal teams aligned and focuses. This file is auto generated and auto fed by the other 3 trackers. Each client gets their own tracker to follow along with progress on tasks, deliverables, links and content. A file to manage the PR, link building and influencer outreach across the agency. A file to manage content creation across clients at the agency, complete with content calendar.
This Sheet is wired to “push” data to other Sheets trackers for hands free management.
The file that tracks day to day tasks, deliverables and open items. Instead, we designed a suite of Sheets, that each perform one specific job.įor WEBRIS’s SEO project management suite, we split Sheets into their separate functions: That Sheet inevitably ends up like a junk drawer – a wasteland where tasks and projects go to be forever ignored.
It’s tempting to build one master project management Sheet, that has *all* your data packed into it. It wasn’t easy or simple – we built Sheets just to trash them a week later, and went through dozens of iterations on the templates.īut at the end of the day, we landed on four simple rules for project management in Sheets. We decided build it into a fully-connected platform. They had an entire suite of templates built to run their agency – templates for project management, content creation, outreach campaigns, and client reporting. Working with WEBRIS is always a pleasure, they meticulously document processes (this making our job easier).