If you have permission in your user role to “Add/Edit Projects“, you can create a new project by going to Projects >> Projects List and clicking the + New Project button at the top. That will open the “New Project” modal window for you to enter some basic information about this new project.
Every project needs a start date. If that date is in the future, this project will be labeled as “Pending”. If the “Due Date” (deadline) is in the past, this project will be labeled as “Late”. All tasks within this project will need to fall within this date range, but don’t worry too much about that right now. You can always modify these dates visually using the interactive Gantt chart.
Fields and Their Meaning
We’ve already gone over what the Start and Due dates are about. Up next, we need to give our Project a Name (required). The project’s Subtitle and Description are just a place to give it a little more clarification or differentiation from other projects which may have similar names. Both of these fields are optional and you can edit them later.
The project Owner is a required field. This is the user with the rights to make major updates to the project, such as changing its start and end dates or changing who can view it and who is on the team working on it.
Viewers of a project are interested parties who can see the project and its status, but they are not actively working on it.
Team Members are the group of people actually working on this project. They can create/edit tasks associated with it (if they have that permission in their user role) and reassign those tasks to other team members.
NOTE: Make sure you add yourself somewhere in there. Your account is not automatically assigned to the project even if you created it.
Lastly, there’s a dropdown for Initiative. These are the big, yearly or quarterly goals for the organization. If this project is supposed to move the needle on one of these big organizational goals, be sure to select the appropriate Initiative from the dropdown.
Initiatives are managed separately in Project Settings.
Once you’ve got all that done, click the red Create New Project button.
After that project has been created, click its title or the Details button to view the tasks associated with that project. Since you just created the project, there aren’t any tasks yet, so you’ll need to add some. Click the green + New Task button to start creating some tasks for this new project and assigning them to team members.
UP NEXT: Task Management
