Understanding Projects, Jobs, Stages, and Tasks

Projects, jobs, stages, and tasks are key concepts used in the Jobs area.

The following figure illustrates the relationships among these concepts.

Projects

A project is a container that holds together related pieces of work such as a campaign that includes multiple deliverables. For example, if the project is a brand refresh, you might call it the Rebrand project, which includes multiple components such as the Logo job, the Brochure Reprint job, and the Web Refresh job.

Jobs

A job in TrafficLIVE is something that you want to push through a workflow. This contrasts with a quote, whose main purpose is to calculate a price and manage your sales pipeline. A job consists of:

• A dashboard that shows general details.
• A series of tasks to be budgeted and allocated to people.
• Milestones to be achieved.
• Purchases needed for the job, and the associated purchase orders (POs) and purchase invoices (PIs).
• Expenses that are forecast to occur or have actually occurred.
• Billing information, including invoicing.

You can populate a job's budget by:

• Converting an approved quote.
• Creating job detail manually on the Time, Expenses, and Purchases tabs.
• Applying a template.
• Importing job details from an external source such as MS Project or Merlin.

Tasks

Tasks are scheduled and assigned to people, and in turn people add time to tasks. A task has:

• A description.
• A charge band.
• A time value, in hours, that you expect the task to take.
• An anticipated cost and markup linked to the charge band (this can be turned off in Admin).
• A price per hour after markup.
• A total for the task (hours x price).
• Work hours.

A task type dictates the expected revenue and profit for a task based on how the task is to be billed:

• Fee tasks are billed at the fixed budgeted hours, regardless of the time spent, so you cannot recover overrun.
• Time tasks are billed for all time spent and are not capped to the estimate. The assumption is that any overrun will be billed.
• Milestones have a date on the schedule, but no time, effort, or monetary implication.

Milestones

• TrafficLIVE displays a milestone on the schedule as a brown diamond that has a single date instead of a start or end date.
• Milestones must be approved in the same way that tasks must. If your system is set up so that scheduled items need approval before being added to the workflow, any added milestones also must be approved before they are seen in the workflow.
• Milestones do not exist for quotes. When you convert a quote to a job, you must manually add any needed milestones.
• When you add a milestone, all financial values are set to zero and read-only.
• You can set dependencies and assign people to milestones. You cannot use the Time tab Quick Schedule feature to assign milestones.
• Milestones are included in the Task Progress and Staff Allocations task count on the Job Overview page.
• You can mark a milestone Complete in My Calendar.

Stages

A stage is a hierarchical level within a job that is used to segregate tasks into job phases. A stage cannot be scheduled or used to log time, but it can be billed. It is the sum of the tasks and stages within it, and their financial and time information.