General Plunet PM Guide 11. Special Project Setups

If you project is too big or too complex to be handled in a single project in Plunet, you can get support to set it up in the best way for your particular case.

Depending on the scope, material types, timelines or workflows, various projects can be set up in parallel under an 'umbrella' project. This will make it easier to handle the various parts of the project separately.

Here is an example from TIMSS 27 FT:

Four sub-projects were set up to accommodate the various material types in the project. It would have been too cumbersome and confusing to handle all this in a single project in Plunet.

The benefits of this approach for TIMMS27 FT. In this case, separation by material type made it easier to:

1. follow progress. The UI in Plunet does not support well such large projects if the entire scope is worked on in a single project.
2. use more complex workflows. In this case, IEA themselves logged into Plunet with their own user accounts and activated workflow steps from their side. This would not have been possible if the project was handled in one Plunet project.
3. update Sales Order values when the budget changed.
4. differentiate GPMs for each material type. 

It is recommended that you contact OPS and Stefanos in order to implement the best project separation for your particular case.

If you seem to be constantly creating similar/identical projects in Plunet for similar requests from your client, you may benefit from creating a template.

Before creating a quote/order template or item template, make sure the checkbox is set correctly to what you want to create.

Quote/Order templates
Quote/Order templates are created from Quotes > Templates for quote templates (if you create lots of similar quotes) and from Orders > Templates for order templates (if you create lots of similar quotes). 

These two menus work in almost the same way.

Template data is filled in the same exact way as creating any quote or order. The data that you can fill in a template is the data that will be prefilled when you use the template to create a quote or order.

From Quotes > Select > Quote from template and Orders > Select > Order from template you can use the template you created to create a quote or order.

Item templates
Sometimes different projects need to have similar or identical items but not the same data. Item templates can help with that. Item templates are essentially pre-created items that can be added all at once into a quote or order.

Please name all templates consistently with the existing templates. 

If you need to create a (sometimes) lengthy sequence of jobs for a lot of languages in a project, you can do that faster by creating a workflow template.

For example, you have 50 locales with TRA, REV and VER, ordinarily you'd need to add the jobs one at a time to all languages, using the bulk action menu. That means three passes of the bulk action menu, and then a perhaps lengthy customization of 150 jobs. Using the bulk action menu helps to do this faster, but a workflow template could be even quicker.

Go to Orders > Workflow templates and create a new one.

Remember to use similar or consistent naming compared to existing workflow templates. This makes your templates identifiable to other PMs.

If your template is only going to be used for a specific set customers or projects, select Released for selected customer from the Status drop down menu. It is usually recommended to limit the template visibility only to customers that would need this, so as not to clutter up the view for other projects that won't require this template.

Click Save.

From the right hand side, select the customers in whose projects this template will be selectable.

In the top right, click Workflow editor to enter the editor.

Drag and drop jobs from the right into the center of the screen to create a sequence of jobs (which in Plunet lingo make up the workflow). 

Open each job you have added to customize it. Once customized, and when you add this workflow template to an item, it will by default contain the data you have specified here. This data can be instructions (in the form of a job comment), wordcounts, prices and resource selection criteria. 

In TIMMS27 FT we used Plunet for the first time as a workflow containing steps that the client could interact with, monitor status, upload files and send notifications at workflow transitions.

Essentially, Plunet was converted into an interactive workflow for PMs and client contact people.

Notifications could be sent from one party to the other to indicate readiness of materials for verification, completion of verification process, review completions etc. Files could be uploaded at worklfow transitions (style guides, word files for verification etc.).

The workflow looked like this:

If you think this could be something you could make use of, please contact OPS and Stefanos.

This setup requires changing settings that are not accessible to PMs.

It is possible to deliver your file deliverables to the client for your project via Plunet and without generating a download link from Nextcloud.

Navigate to your Order and go to Output > Delivery.

Click on Open delivery dialog to open the settings to prepare your delivery.

In 1. Prepare items, you can choose to deliver items separately, by copying or moving files from the Target folders of specific jobs to the delivery location of that item. This is not very useful, except in very specific cases.

In 2. Prepare delivery folder, you can choose which files from which Target folders of specific jobs should be copied to the Final folder. This is folder in each Plunet project that the client can be given access to download specific files from. This section is also not that useful, because usually PMs copy or edit the files they want to deliver to the Final folder manually themselves.

In 3. Delivery is where you can actually perform the task of selecting which files you want to deliver to the client. Make sure all the files you want to deliver are zipped in the Final folder before doing any of this. The Delivery dialog detects all files present in this folder and allows the user to select them. Select the files you want and the delivery method you want to use.

In 4. Change status, you can see if there are any jobs in the Job list that are still not set to a final status. You can do this in bulk from here.

When clicking Apply, the actions you have selected will be performed in the order of the above steps. If a step is not checked using the checkbox next to it, it will not be performed.

An automated message will be sent to the client contact person containing a download link, or with an attachment (depending on the delivery method).