Dan
We'll get started I think. So today on the webinar we've got myself Dan. You're probably familiar if you've watched the webinars previously. We've got Jack here with me again today. And we've also got Kim joining us as well.
Dan
Kim's joining from elsewhere. Kim if you want to just say hello, make sure everyone can hear you all okay.
Kim
Hi, I'm here. Hello.
Dan
Great, excellent, I can hear you, that's fine. So just a couple of house rules before we get started. So we're gonna try and keep today's webinar at around 20 minutes or so. So a bit shorter than previous ones.
Dan
So we've got quite a bit to get through. So we'll go through that as quickly as we can. If you've got any questions about what we're asking today, feel free to drop them in the Q&A window. Obviously some of you have already used that to let us know you can hear us, so that's good.
Dan
We'll try and answer as much as we can in the webinar. If your question doesn't get answered, don't worry. We'll pick it up after and we'll get back to each and every one of you. So before we jump into the main content of the webinar today, which is gonna be milestones, I just wanted to show you our new Alpha Tracker website.
Dan
So that should be showing on screen now. Kim, can you see that all okay?
Kim
Yes, I can see the website there. Looks great, doesn't it? Lovely photo.
Dan
It does, it does. Yeah, it's a great photo. Yeah, lovely. So this is our new website. Some of you may have seen it. Some of you may not have seen it. And essentially, yeah, this is our Alpha Tracker website.
Dan
And what I also wanted to talk about quickly was our damage report that we've done. Again, you may have seen something about this on our blog posts or on our LinkedIn posts. And this is essentially a damage report that we've had done to show the poor condition of asbestos in our schools, hospitals, and houses.
Dan
So Jack, if you wanna show that off, this is our printed copy here. So if you want a printed copy, get in touch with us and we can get one of those sent out to you. Alternatively, you can download a PDF copy from the website here and you can download that straight away.
Dan
But if you do want a printed copy, do let us know and we can send those out to you. So now we've just gone through those. Let's get started with the webinar. So with all our webinars, we try and show you something that's possibly new to you that you might not know existed in Alpha Tracker and point you in the right direction.
Dan
So today we're covering milestones. Now, a lot of you probably use milestones to some degree or another, but there are quite a few features available within this milestone setup. And I'm gonna guess that I would say all of you aren't using every part of the milestone.
Dan
So we wanna show you how powerful these are and what you can do. So we use these in our own Alpha Tracker system and they are really useful. So to start with, I'm on the milestone setup screen. So this is, it's a relatively new screen.
Dan
It's probably in the last couple of releases, I would say, Jack, it's coming up.
Jack
Yeah, it wasn't in release 39, I think it was released 38 the previous release so you some of you may have already seen the screen but some of you may may haven't. But this is just a easy dialogue to see all of the milestones in one place.
Dan
Exactly that, exactly that. So to get started, we've got the standard milestones. So these are literally the standard milestones that you'll see on any project or job that you open in the system. So you've got these listed down here and they are literally just the very basic milestones that you'd get for any job.
Dan
So when was it opened? When did you produce the report? When was the order received? Have you produced your report? And then have you invoiced it and closed it? Nice and simple. So they are our standard milestones.
Dan
And we've also got the option to show these on what we call the project pipeline. Now, I won't go into the project pipeline yet, that will come later, but I just wanted to mention that now, just while we've got it on screen, so you can control if these show on the pipeline or not.
Dan
So they're nice and simple. Moving on, we've got the key milestones. Now, this list did start off quite small. When we first started, I think there's probably about three or four on here to begin with, Jack.
Dan
Now we're up to 12 key milestones. So these are a preset list of milestones. And essentially, when you assign these to an actual milestone, the dates get automatically populated. So these are automatically triggered things.
Dan
So let's pick an easy one. When a site visit is booked, this will then automatically trigger updates for this key milestone. So as soon as you book in a job in the diary, this milestone will say, great, this has been done.
Dan
And anything linked to that site visit booked will then get automatically updated. So these key milestones are really useful for essentially automating your process, aren't they? You can assign them to your milestones.
Dan
And when things happen, these will automatically get updated. Now, as well as that happening, you can also choose if you want project statuses to be updated. So some of you may use a project status, some of you may not.
Dan
We've got a handful set up here on our demo system, as you can see. And when things happen, you can trigger project statuses to be updated as well. So that's really useful if, for example, let's have a look at one that we've got here.
Dan
When the draft report has been produced, for example, you might want to update the status to be in progress. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you can obviously change and customize all of your project status, but these can be updated automatically as well.
Dan
Now, this might not be fully making sense with you if you're completely unfamiliar with milestones, but this next tab will hopefully explain that and show how everything fits into place. So this is the core of the milestones.
Dan
This is what we refer to as the custom milestones. So these are milestones that you can set up yourselves and have them specific to different project or job types within the system. So again, we've got lots of test ones on our demo system here, but the one we prepared earlier in true Blue Peter fashion was our asbestos surveys.
Dan
Hopefully this is something that would be all completely familiar with everyone and it will make sense to you all. So for an asbestos survey, our default milestones are these as follows. So we've got eight additional milestones.
Dan
So we've got a project due date. When the site visit was booked, first and last days on site. So this is when your survey is going out and actually doing the survey itself. When the samples have been received in lab, when they've been analyzed, when you've completed the plan, and then when you've done your equality checks.
Dan
So they're just some typical milestones that we've set up. Like I said, you can customize these and have whatever milestones you want in there. You can pick what order these milestones are to be done in just by using the position.
Dan
And then there are a number of different settings that you've got against each milestone as well. So target dates, these are really, really cool. And essentially you can set target dates for each of these milestones.
Dan
And they can trigger from either the last milestone that was completed and it keeps recalculating. So that's our dynamic milestones, or you can have them set and they'll just be set in stone. And then that'll be what your target is for that particular job.
Dan
So for example, project due date, that's due one day after the last milestone. In this case, it will be the milestone when it was open plus when it was in Tracker.
Jack
And then you can see it's linked to the key milestone, project due date. So importantly to go back to the key milestone section, each milestone is linked to those key milestones. So you can call the milestone in anything you like, but link it to a key milestone in the system.
Jack
So the system will recognize your milestone as the project due date or the site visit booked, like we mentioned earlier, and then those will get populated and read from automatically.
Dan
Exactly that. And because, like Jack said, we're doing that all automatically, these milestones that you've set up, as you can see in this example, we've got all of them linked to key milestones, so you won't actually do anything to update these manually.
Dan
As soon as things happen in the system, these dates will start getting updated automatically, and you'll see these been filled out, and it basically tracks the progress of the job without you actually needing to do anything.
Dan
All you need to do is make sure that it's set up correctly. You've got your key milestones in, and in theory, it should just do the rest for you.
Jack
That's it and it should just fill it out and wherever you see, wherever it's read from, you'll see it in the system as well and get like colour indications and things like that. And you're not restricted by those, you can set up your own, they're called custom milestones because they are custom, so we could add some additional ones and not link them to key milestones, but then it would be for for yourselves to fill those milestones in.
Dan
Exactly that, exactly that. Thanks, Jack. And what we also have as well, which is really, really nice, is when a particular milestone has been completed, we can then trigger documents to be generated. Now these documents could be survey reports, they could be book certificates.
Dan
I'm pretty sure we can do standard documents as well.
Jack
As long as they're linked to the project type that you're setting them up for then any of the documents are available and like Dan said including the actual draft and final version of the survey report.
Dan
So you can see we've got one here so when when we've completed the plan, we've actually got a document trigger to fire so the survey report will be generated. As soon as that plan has been marked as being completed.
Dan
And then once it's generated, it will actually then send out to the lead surveyor on this particular project. So you don't even need to do anything before you're starting to get your survey or draft surveys through essentially as soon as things happen in the system, these documents can be automatically requested and generated.
Dan
And you can control again who this goes to you can send it to the lead surveyor, project manager, whoever it may be. And you can you can customize all this just within your within your milestone setup.
Dan
And if they don't fall into one of these groups or if you want a particular person to always get this document, you can just specify that email here. And essentially, as soon as that plan is completed, they'll get an email to say plans completed.
Dan
Here's the here's the document that's been has been generated.
Jack
As well as it can actually send in multiple groups as well. So lead surveyor can be selected, so can assistants of air or whatever groups or roles you have set up in your Alpha Tracker system, you can select multiple of those and the documents are go out to all of the staff who are part of the project staff for that job.
Dan
Yeah, it's really flexible and yeah you can customize it to however you want it to be and then we do have a few other options over here that you can turn on. So for example you can exclude people from the completed by emails, you can put a delay on when the documents are to be generated and then you can also even close projects when certain things are done.
Dan
So in this example again when we've completed our quality checks, we've done our QC in and it's all good to go, we can actually close the project straight away. So yeah you can almost drive everything about the project from this milestone screen.
Dan
So that's our custom milestone setup. Now what's really cool is we can customize these by turnaround as well. Now this is a thing that I don't think many people will probably be using.
Jack
This is a relatively new feature that we've only really just added to our Alpha Tracker and release 39. So a lot of you may not have seen this yet.
Dan
So, we have in this case a default turnaround and this turnaround actually relates to the turnaround that's shown on the project that you've got here. So some of you have probably have seen this field but may not have used it or may not be using it to its full potential.
Dan
So if this particular survey was a high priority job what it would do is then use the high priority turnaround milestones. Now I haven't got any setup for the high priority at the moment but what we can do is copy the default template so if we say yes to this this will copy everything we've set up in the default for high priority but the idea is you can then go ahead and tweak more often than not your targets so you can say actually it's not 10 days from the last this is going to be five days from the last and it's going to be four days here and you can you can tweak your targets accordingly based on your turnaround times.
Dan
So it's really useful if you're doing particular surveys and you're doing just a normal management survey but the client said look we need this in a in a high turnaround we need it in a 48 hour turnaround you can just change the turnaround on the project make sure you've got your milestone set up and then that way it will just use all of those high priority turnaround settings and you won't need to create a new project type to say asbestos survey 48 hour for example you can just use your standard project type and then they they change accordingly which I think is really cool actually you can keep your project nice and neat without needing to create your 48 hour turnaround and your 24 hour turnaround and so on and so forth.
Dan
So that is a very quick rundown of the three different categories of milestones we've got in there Kim am I missing anything there have you have you thought of anything that I haven't covered or is that a quick overview of what we've got going on?
Kim
I think that's great. I think that's great. There is a new feature we've got, which is the ability to start the countdown from a specified milestone might be worth saying something about that. So it doesn't just start from the project open date.
Jack
Yeah, so by default, the target dates are calculated from when the project was opened, but we can set it in the system so that the target date calculation only begins once a particular key milestone has been completed.
Jack
So, for example, you might not want your target dates to begin automatically calculating until the surveyor has finished the survey on site, for example. That's possible, that can be set up.
Dan
Yep, so we found that some of our clients, like Jack said, didn't want to start that countdown until something has actually happened. So you may book in lots of work, but then you might not be actually doing the work for another two months.
Dan
So you don't want your countdowns to start off when it was opened. You want it to start from, yeah, either the survey has been on site or you've actually booked the work into the diary, for example.
Kim
I think that's really useful, isn't it? Because if you want your project due date to be, say, five days after the survey took place, it's just a great way of getting that set up automatically for you.
Dan
Exactly that Kim, exactly that. So now we've run through the milestones. What I did briefly mention earlier was the project pipeline. So I'd like to show you that before we wrap up. So again some of you may have used this, some of you may not have, and essentially it's a way of seeing the status of all of your different projects and where they're at with their particular milestones.
Dan
So what I'll do is just search for the project, our test project here, so you can see what's going on. So this will show essentially like a timeline, so it is the pipeline of where this particular project's at.
Dan
So you can see we've got the project open, obviously that was completed, that was done, we opened that today, and we also produced the report today as well. But now we've got all of the other custom milestones showing in our pipeline here.
Dan
So as these start to get updated automatically these will start getting knocked off and going green. So you can see at a glance where a project is at within those custom milestones that you've set up, and even better this pipeline is actually available for your clients.
Dan
So we can make this available in the client portal so your clients can see where things, where jobs are at in the pipeline. And again because you've got that automation from the key milestones you won't even need to update stuff, your clients will see when things are happening essentially in real time.
Dan
So it's really good for keeping your clients up to date with where things are at on a particular job or particular set of jobs.
Jack
As well as on the pipeline as well you can filter it down to just your own projects as well you'll see at the top there's a couple of filter buttons and one of the really useful ones is my projects so if you're a project manager whoever sees lots of jobs that's really useful to see all the progress where everything's at all in one place.
Kim
We've got a question on whether you can create milestones retrospectively on older projects. So it might be saying a word about refreshing milestones.
Dan
Yes yeah great thanks for that Kim. So yeah you can you can basically add your custom milestones whenever you want and you can add in milestones for example we could add in a new one here and then what you can do is go on to the milestone section on the project and then there's a refresh milestones button and essentially that will pull through any new milestones that you've that you've had and it'll add those onto the project so you don't have to have your milestone before you set up the project if that makes sense.
Dan
It's obviously better to try and have your template set up but we understand that things change and you want to add new steps or indeed take away steps as things change and you can you can just go ahead and refresh your your milestones there and that'll take care of it nicely for you.
Dan
So I think that takes us up to our to our 20 minute bar that's blown by today hasn't it Kim but have we got any other questions or shall we wrap up there and yeah take it from there.
Dan
Cool so I think we'll call it a day now if we haven't gotten on to any of the questions we'll get back to you Kim we'll drop you over an email and answer those outside of the webinar but I just wanted to say a big thanks from myself, Jack and Kim for joining us today hopefully you've you've learned something new from the milestone section it is quite in depth when you start getting into that and if you do think of anything else in the meantime feel free to ask us and again just to remind you if you do want to have a copy of our damage report please feel free to get in touch or go to our new website and you can download that there but I think that's all for now so until next time see you all then thanks for joining
Jack
Thanks guys.
Dan
See ya.
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