ClickUp for Project Managers [The Ultimate Guide]

In this video, I'm going to walk you through the best practices when it comes to being a project manager inside of ClickUp. And so if you're a project manager that's looking for really the best views and the best ways to be able to sort of manage projects across your team or different teams manage clients in the system, then this is going to be the video for you. And so before I jump too far into actually getting into ClickUp and talking through all those different views and things that you want to have inside of the system, let's first jump into sort of our resourcing flow at ZenPilot that we use to really, especially for agencies or any team that's servicing clients. What's really the best sort of ways for us to get work into the system and get those timelines set and actually get it completed on time for our clients. And so the way that we look at this is the first sort of left hand side here is we really have three main roles. The left hand side, our demand seat is going to be really our account managers or our client strategists, really the ones that are working hand in hand with, with our clients to understand their goals, to understand their objectives, and then build a strategy for them to actually go ahead and exceed those goals and objectives that they had. So they're the ones working with the clients and then they're gonna figure out what that work is that we need to complete for them, for them again to exceed their goals. And from there we have the demand side, but we also have obviously the fulfillment side, which those are basically the people on your team that you're are your worker bees, individual contributors, the people that are actually, uh, getting that work from the account managers and getting it done. So the people writing the blog post, the people that are creating the ads, designing different ads as well, and different thumbnails, things like that that they would be doing. Those could be contractors, those could be full time team members or whoever. Just the people that are getting those individual tasks complete. That's your fulfillment seat. But in addition, what you're paying attention to the most because you are a project manager, is going to be this resource seat. So your resource seat is really in charge of working, working with both the demand and the fulfillment side to understand what that work is and then make sure we can build a realistic timeline for our client and then stick to that timeline as well. Because the best thing that we can do for a client is say, hey, we're going to get this done on September 20th and then maybe Either a, we finish it a little early or we just get it done on time, because that's when we said we were going to get it done on time as well. So you're going to be the one that's managing those timelines and making sure that the team is keeping up with that, making sure the team is following those due dates that you've put into the system, but also making sure that you're not working, overwhelming or underwhelming your team as well, because you're managing the resources. You're the one that's going to be looking at that workload view to be able to make sure that you're not overbooking someone or under booking someone and making sure that all the work is flowing through the system smoothly to again provide good, realistic expectations for your clients. So in terms of the role overview, in terms of what you'd be doing again, you're the one as a project manager assigning tasks to those fulfillment people, the individual contributors. We're going to be using Deliver Roles, which is a custom field, which I'll show you what that looks like in Inside of ClickUp. You'll be monitoring timelines to make sure those tasks are completed on schedule. You'll be looking ahead in that workload view to be able to identify gaps, to understand, hey, do we need a. Maybe we need another copywriter. Maybe we have 80 hours of copywriting work to do, but we only have 40 hours of capacity because we only have one person on the team. Is there a certain contractor or someone that we can bring in? So you'll be kind of going through that as well. You'll be in monitoring, monitoring and managing any task statuses, following up on tasks that are regularly being rescheduled without context. That's something that we don't want. We want to build a good habit of in the system where those due dates mean something. They are when the task is actually due. And if someone moves that task again and again and again, that's not going to help us again get those realistic expectations on that timeline for the client. And you'll also be working with a fulfillment team to say, hey, this is a high priority. Maybe they are. Maybe we are stretched a little thin. Maybe another priority comes in based off of that demand side, saying, hey, the client wanted to do this, we got to switch some things up. You'll be working through those as well, just to make sure that the team knows what is the highest priority item that we have to do. If maybe we have to push some projects back based off of what the client is telling us to do. Then in addition, you might also be the ClickUp Champion, who is someone that's going to be going and managing the workspace to make sure every task has a due date, a time estimate, an assignee, all those custom fields. Make sure the team is building healthy habits in the system. Because that's essentially what we need to actually be successful inside of ClickUp is we need everyone to be working in a similar fashion, tracking their time, things like that, those habits that we're going to need. And so the ClickUp Champion is in charge of that. And I have a whole nother video, a lot of other resources that I'll put in the description below if you're curious about a ClickUp Champion, what they do, the role, things like that. We won't get in as much detail into that role specifically in this video, but we have plenty of other resources on that one on our channel. Then in addition, you'll be working with the demand team when things need to be remapped and changed up, as we mentioned earlier. So those are really the main roles of the project management, that resource. So now let's jump into ClickUp and really bring this to life of what we can actually do to accomplish this. And so the first thing that I want to mention in terms of building the system from the ground up to really help us to be able to do any of this. A lot of this revolves around the hierarchy, because the hierarchy, if we design it correctly, this is going to give us the visibility that we need as a project manager to be able to manage projects across multiple different clients without getting a headache and having to jump into a bunch of different places with we can just see it all in one place for us to make it very, very easy. So if you've watched any of our content before, you'll know sort of our main hierarchy. If you don't, I'll put that in description below another video that'll go through that in a bit more detail. But I want to give a quick summary here so that you know the best hierarchy, especially for client services or really any agencies here as well. And so here I have a delivery space. And so space is really the basically the highest level in your ClickUp workspace. The workspace is technically the highest, but when I put all of my delivery work in into one space as a project manager now I'm able to see all of that delivery work in one place, which makes it very easy for me as a project manager, I can also filter that view down if I'm only in charge of a few clients. But I really want to put all that work into one place to make it easy for your project managers. In addition to that, after that space, we then have a bunch of different folders in here. And each of those folders is going to represent our different clients. And so we have Hannaford, we have Food, Lion, Giant, Eagle, Dun, Mifflin, so on and so forth. Each client is going to get their own folder and the work for that client is going to go into that one folder. So as you can see here, Hannaford has a folder and then we also have a bunch of different lists under here for Hannaford, where that work is actually going to live, because the list is where work actually lives. Work doesn't live in a folder or space. Work lives specifically inside of a list. And so the way that these lists are then set up is each of these lists represent really sort of a different contract for each of these clients. So maybe you have a client that has a retainer with you, but also a website project that you're doing. We would have two different lists. If it was just one retainer that you had one project for that client, you would only have one list there. But as you can see here, Hannaford ABM, Hannaford website build 20, 24. And then each of these lists, then we have all of our tasks, as I mentioned before. And the way that we break down tasks to make it very easy for our project managers to know exactly where projects or deliverables actually are for our clients is most teams are just going to put a bunch of parent tasks into a system, just one task, assign it to multiple people, or use a bunch of automations and status changes to change that assignee. But what we want to do is we want to take that work that we're doing and break it up into subtasks. And so to give you an example, let's say we're doing a blog post for Hannaford here. As you can see, I have this one listed out. I have one parent task which is really the name of that blog post. This is what we're doing for them. And then underneath that is going to be all of the subtasks that will then be assigned out individually because this is the work each person is doing to help us complete that blog post. So again, parent task is the name of the deliverable. Could also be a milestone if this is a larger project. But then underneath that is all the steps from creating the strategy, to writing the outline, to interviewing the client. If we have to to sending to a client for review, posting the client feedback to the next step, all the way to scheduling that blog post. All of those different steps are what are necessary to complete that larger deliverable. So all of that work together is what completes this. And when we break that up, it's going to make it way easier for me as a project manager to know exactly what step we're on, to know exactly what we finished, where that time actually went, and start to know sort of what pieces of this project are overdue or are ahead of schedule. Because when you only have maybe one task in the system for this blog post and it's assigned a bunch of different people, or maybe not, I'm not able to know really what step we're at and how well we're pacing towards that timeline. So this is so important to have a task structure like this to make it easy for me to know who's accountable for what piece in this workflow, as well as know exactly how far along we are on this specific project. And so that's just at sort of the one list level, that's just the one deliverable. So it seems great there. But if I'm a project manager and I want to see it sort of a bunch of different projects in one place, the reason this hierarchy is so important now is because now I can jump up to the delivery space and I can see all that work across all of the clients that I'm a project manager for. I can see all of that in one place. So as you can see here, Food Lion, Giant Eagle, I'm not at the delivery space and I have what is called our deliverable progress view, which I'm grouping by a client custom field that I have in here. I have all those subtasks collapsed. I have a couple different filters in here, which I'll go over in just a moment. But as you can see here, what I'm doing is I'm showing a couple of different columns here. I'm showing a progress bar, which is a custom field that basically automatically updates whenever a subtask is complete. Underneath that parent task, which is super cool, I'm showing how much time has been tracked, what the time estimate was, when this is actually due, the status, so on and so forth. All of that is going to give me a really nice update for how far along we are on this project. So as you can see here, I can also take these, I can drop them down. We're writing a newsletter for Food lion in August, and you see all we need to do is now schedule that newsletter to send. I can jump into this and if I wanted to see all those closed subtasks, I can see what we've completed. If the team is communicating well and they're all communicating in one place, all of that could live in the parent task as well. That way, project managers, account managers, and that fulfillment seat, we can all see it in one place. We can all know exactly what's happening. We can get good, realistic updates there. And so if I centralize all that communication to one place, that's going to be super great for my team as well. So highly recommend you put your communication in the parent task too, to make it easier for project managers as well as the whole team. But as you can see here, Foodline, Giant Eagle, Hannaford, all of that information is going to be in here for me to see exactly what we're working on, exactly what's. What's overdue, exactly the status of all of these, know how far along we are on all these with that progress bar. And I'm building a really good view for me to be able to see that information as opposed to having to jump in all those individual items, have to leave a bunch of comments, say, what's the status update? What's the status update? What's the status update? We don't necessarily want to do that, though that can be helpful. And sometimes that's a project manager's role here. If I build that granularity into the system, it makes it much easier for me as a project manager to do my job. So the more we can break those tasks up into those subtasks to be a little bit more granular, the better off we'll be. And so with that, I'll show you one tip in terms of how I actually create this view. But again, part of this is gonna be the hierarchy here. But as you can see, I have a bunch of different clients. It's not just Food, Lion, Giant Eagle and Hannaford. So what you're able to do, as you can see, this deliverable progress view is filter down by a client lead custom field. So that could be client lead, that could be pod, that could be Project manager, Essentially any sort of custom field, this is a dropdown. But any custom field that I would want to be able to use as a filter, for me as a project manager to. I could use that as a filter for a view, I could use that as a filter for a dashboard. But I want a piece of data or a custom field, as we're calling it here, to Be able to create that filter for me to just see the work that I really care about. So what I can do to easily make this applying to all those tasks, because sometimes getting those custom fields and all of our tasks can be a little bit difficult. But what I'd be able to do is I can actually automate that process by each folder here. Essentially, if I'm in charge of Hannaford Food lion and Giant Eagle there, I could build an automation at each of those folder levels that essentially allows me to say, hey, whenever a task is created in this folder, this folder, or this folder, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to set a custom field. As you can see, that client custom field I can use as well. But then I'll also do set custom field of client lead. Again, this could be pod, this could be project manager, whatever it is, whatever you want to call it, that can just be me. If I'm the project manager there, I can apply that to myself. So again, these are both dropdowns there. We can match up all the colors as well as you see the clients with the client leads or project managers with actual folder colors just makes it more visually make sense there. So as you can see, we can do that to create those views. Again that can be used for a dashboard as well. But I'm able to use that client custom field, a dropdown to group it by that, but then also filter it down by that client lead one there as well. So again, that makes it super easy for me to get all of that create those views to make it easy for me as a project manager. And so within that, one thing I want to first talk about before we actually talk about how we can actually get all that work deployed and different things like that. But what you want to do, because obviously it's not super simple to go and create all these workflows like that with the parent tasks subtasks, all those due dates, all those time estimates. So what you do want to do is you want to actually go ahead and build a process template library. And so if you've seen any of my videos, I talk about this basically in every single video, because this is so, so important. But what you want to do, if you're a project manager, encourage your team to build something like this out, because this is a great way to really systematize your entire business, but also just make it so much easier for you to actually go ahead and create and deploy work. So especially if you're a business that is very repeatable and you do a lot of similar things for a lot of different clients, then this will be super easy. So, as you can see in my template library, I have a bunch of different lists here. These are essentially all the work categories that we might have as a business. And we'll go and inbound here to show you what this looks like. But essentially what I'm building out is all of the source files for me to create ClickUp templates to then use to actually go ahead and create that work. And so in here, whether I do podcasts, case studies, quizzes, landing pages, infographics, all the way down to blogs. As you'll see, each of these, as we showed that structure earlier, has the parent task representing that deliverable or a milestone within a project. And then all the subtasks are going to represent each individual step to complete that blog post. So with that, then I also have due dates, which in a template, this can just be a date map. So all I really care about is the distance between all of these. So how far do I think these should be spread apart? One big tip here is that whenever you have tasks like this where we need to send the blog to client for review and actually receive that client feedback, we typically put a couple days in between those because it does take the client realistically, 1, 2, 3, sometimes more days to actually get us their feedback. So we want to build that into our timelines here to again create those timelines to be more realistic based off of historical data that we have in the system. In addition, with our due dates, we have all our time estimates in there. These don't have to be perfect. The the better you can make them over time, the better, because it's going to help us with workload. But then I have a bunch of different custom fields, and then I also have dependencies built into all of these as well. And so the dependencies, I'll show you a little bit later on how these are actually used. But once I get these dependencies built in here, they're going to be very helpful for me to actually go ahead and remap projects in the system. And so I would say with this one big thing, I do have another video on how to actually use dependencies that I'll put in the description below if you're more curious about that. But the big thing with this in terms of how this is set up, is all of these tasks are gonna flow like this. The last subtask due date should match the parent task due date, and it should block that. And I'll show you why in just a moment. But as you can see here, when this is, the last subtask is done, the parent task is done. So that's a great way for us to show the client if we wanna give them a little bit more granularity on sort of what steps we're doing. And if we have to push out a timeline, which I'll again, I'll get into this in just a moment. But that's a great way to build your workflow there because again, when that last subtask is done, your parent task is also complete. And so build those dependencies in there and then bring them with your templates, which can be helpful. But a couple other things in this. One of the most important custom fields that you can have in here that's going to be very helpful for you as a project manager is this role custom field. So this is another dropdown that we're going to use to assign this work in the future. And I can also use it for making smarter hiring decisions or good resourcing. Because essentially what I'm doing is instead of assigning any of these tasks in my template library to people, because I don't want to do that, because I want to build these to scale. Not everyone is going to. Not one person is writing the blog copy for every client. Even if you do that right now, as you build and grow the business, that's not always going to be the case. And so I want to use this role custom field. And basically each task is going to have that role. For what role should be completing this specific task? Who should be creating the blog strategy, that's the senior strategist who should be writing the outline. That's going to be the copywriter. So each task is going to have a role again, that'll then be in the future, I'll use that to assign the work out to the copywriter for that client. Then in addition, I can use this to be able to tell me, hey, we have 80 hours of copywriter work, but only 40 hours of copywriter work on the team. So maybe I need to bring on someone new or maybe I need to bring on a contractor. I can use that to make good, smart resourcing decisions. So make sure you get that in there. Make sure you have due dates, time estimates, any other custom fields you would need for filtering and data purposes. But in addition, another tip with this is also using the task descriptions to link out to your standard operating procedures, many sort of process documentation. You also want to get in there as well to really systematize the business. But after you're done with all those, what you're going to do is we need to actually save this as a template. So click on that parent task, come over here to the task settings into your templates and actually save this as a template, follows those instructions. And then basically all of these that you've just created and laid out here, just save all of those as templates to really systematize your business and help you create work that much easier. And so you can do that with both deliverables. You can do that with any sort of larger projects, things like client onboarding, or any sort of website redesigns that you might do. You want to make sure all of that is built out in the system for you to use those templates over and over and over again. But once I'm done with all that, now let's actually talk about how as a project manager, I can actually get the work into the system assigned out, remap due dates and a bunch of different things like that. So obviously, as we mentioned before, you're going to be working a lot with this demand side to help you sort of get the strategy and understand what's the work that we actually need. Maybe you're doing that as a project manager right now, but. But maybe not. Oftentimes that's not the case. You're just kind of there to help manage the timelines and get the work into the system, but you want to work with that demand side to actually figure out what work we need to do. So again, you have this template library. The demand side tells us that, hey, we need to write a blog post for Hannaford. I can easily. I know exactly what list I need to put this into now I come here and when we actually need to get that work into the system, we work with the demand side to figure out what realistically this timeline could be. I can put it directly in there, so I can easily come up in here, go to my templates, I can browse templates just like this. We'll go to our task templates because that's where our blog post is going to live. I can use this. Let's just name this blog post number one, for a lack of a better name for this one. So name it like that. I can go ahead and remap due dates like this as well. So essentially, again, we're working with the demand side to say, hey, we can realistically get this maybe done in September. That's when the client wants it done. So let's just Say, let's ballpark this and put this due on the September 20th. Just like that. And so because I've built that template and because I have the due dates in there, that date map, all the time estimates, all of that work, all of that is going to come with it. Even the dependencies and everything I put into this template, it's all going to come with that template. So as you can see, these due dates have been remapped. We have our time estimates in there. I have all of my custom fields applied to this as well. As you can see, that custom field that was automated is in there as well. So it makes it very easy for me to get that work into the system. But now when it comes to actually assigning this out and when we can actually maybe have to remap this a little bit based off of me actually going into my workload. So the one thing that you want to do as a project manager is you need to look at your workload. And so I always recommend doing this at the everything level. Because if I build a workload view at the everything level, that's gonna help me see work across all of my spaces. Cause you might have some people on the team that have internal meetings that might live in an operation space, or maybe they're helping us grow the business. Maybe they've jumped in a few sales conversations to help with that side of the business. They need to make sure all that works in the system so they get a realistic workload. We need to see all that work here in this particular view. So if you've never set up a workload view, it's rather easy. Just come here at a view workload, just like that. And as you can see here, this is showing me who actually has time to take on any of this additional work that I just plugged into the system. So this is kind of a great way. I always recommend going to this view a lot. A lot, a lot. Because this allows me to see who is way overbooked, who has basically nothing on their plate, and who is really at capacity there. So as you can see, these are all the people that we have in the system. I can group this by assignee to see who, which assignee has a lot of work. I can also group this by, as we mentioned, that role custom field as well, for me to be able to see sort of based off that role, based off of the copywriter role, the senior strategist, whatever it may be, I can start to see who has a lot of work applied, assigned to that specific role to know, hey, do we need to bring on another copywriter to the team? Do we need to bring on just a contractor, whatever it may be, that's kind of a great way to do that and make smart hiring decisions. Again, those are all built into templates, which we'll need. But this is sort of the main view that you would use and so it's helpful. A lot of times I recommend having this sort of split screen where you can have the workload view on one side of your screen next to sort of that that actual task that you deployed into the system, that workflow you deploy in the system to start to see sort of how that populates this work. Because I can't necessarily overlay it against this workload view, but if I have a split screen side by side, that can make it very helpful for you. But as you can see here, I can't put anything on Gray's plate on this day. I might need to be able to reschedule some of this work as well. As you can see on my plate here, I probably can take on some additional work. Kevin. Some days he can, some days he can't. As you can see ZenPal down here, 36 hours over books, that's probably a huge issue there. But this gives you a good realistic view to be able to see that in one place. And so after you start to understand workload, again, this is hard to get super accurate. I do have a training on the best ways to get it more and more accurate. I'll put in the description below. Great video, especially for project managers to go over the key elements that it takes to actually get this more and more accurate. Especially for agencies, this is something that's super important. But just having a workload view inside of your project management system doesn't really do all of the work. You need to work on actually getting due dates on all of your tasks, time estimates on all your tasks, assignees, and making those time estimates realistic, making those due dates realistic. Because all of that work is going into making this realistic. In addition, we always live by the philosophy of it's not in ClickUp, it didn't happen. You need to make your ClickUp workspace your single source of truth. Any work you do needs to get in the system with a time estimate, with a due date, because again, that's what populates this here, as you can see, assignee that's going to give me this due date, that's going to give me the day and then the time estimate is what actually populates this. So that needs to be on every single task and every single task also needs to be in the system. And so after you have that there. Now let's go back here to our delivery space inside of this blog post that we just deployed. Again, it's helpful to have a split screen to know who has the workload and capacity to actually take on more work. But what I can do now is essentially I can come here to. We have a task assignment view here. Essentially, what this is doing is it's taking the tasks that I just deployed in here. So all the tasks, all that work that you see in here now it's taking all those subtasks and making them separate tasks. So it's basically breaking out all the subtasks from the parent task and making them separate tasks. In addition, what it's doing is it's also grouping by that role custom field. And so again, this is just another list view we're grouping by the role because as you can see here, now I'm able to take and grab all these senior strategist roles, strategist roles, copywriter, so on and so forth, I'm grouping by that specific role. So now what I can do using ClickUp's Multi select toolbar is I can take this and you can see that little box shows up here and I can grab all of those senior strategist tasks and assign it to the correct person. So I'm assigning all those to Gray. If I come down here, I need to assign these strategist tasks to Zen Pilot. I can easily do that to get all this work assigned out. So I want to make sure I go through and assign all that work to the correct people, just like that. In addition, if I had to, I can also use this to reassign work. So if I need to take these senior strategist roles, and maybe Gray was no longer the senior strategist, or maybe we needed to just reassign this for some particular reason. Maybe they left the team. Whatever it may be, I can easily go unassign that and then reassign that to the correct person. So as you can see there, that's now going to assign all the work that I had based off of this workflow right there. And so that's really how you would assign all that work out. Now the other component to this is after we assign that workout, we need to make sure also our timeline is really matched up and correct. So what I would always recommend with with project managers, and this is again a great view to have. I could also Recommend showing this to your clients to maybe in a client sync, because this is a great way for you to show them that the effect that them not getting a review back to you has on the overall timeline. Because as you can see here, essentially what I have is a Gantt view. And I have another video on this that I'll put in the description below. You can watch that for more and more detail on how to best use this Gantt view. But what I can do is I'm able to create a Gantt view here where I can actually go in here and look at my options. We'll look at the layout options. I can reschedule dependencies. I can also go ahead and make sure that weekends are hidden. And so what that does is now, as you can see here, we're hiding the weekends in the scant view. And if I have that reschedule dependencies turned on, what I'm able to do as a project manager, if I need to push any tasks out, I need to sort of remap this timeline is I can easily come here and take a task and grab it. And as you can see, once I have those dependencies on, built into the workflow here, that's gonna help me remap all of these different tasks. You can see, that pushes them out. And then if a task is gonna fall on a Saturday or Sunday because those weekends are hidden, that's actually gonna push that task onto a Monday, making it much easier for me to make sure that work doesn't fall on the weekends for my team. So I want to do that. In addition, the cool part to this as well is because I have this nice date map built out. What I can do is if I have the tasks like send blog to client for the review and post client feedback of the blog to the next step. Let's say we're working with our clients, we're on a call. Or maybe I would just want to put this in email with a quick video to show them, hey, we projected it would take you two days to get back to us to review this blog. It's taken more to that. I just want to show you what kind of effect that's going to have on the timeline. That way you kind of COVID your butts there and let them know, like, hey, this is not on us. This is because you didn't get your review back to us in time. So you can really put the pressure on them to make sure they're completing their work. But now I can take this and I can grab it and Say, hey, because we didn't get your feedback, that's going to push this task out. And we're not going to finish this blog until Thursday now maybe that takes even longer. And so now we're not going to finish it until Friday. So you'll be able to show the clients really how organized you are and sort of that workflow to show them what's. What's happening because they're not getting the review back to you in time. So that's a great way for you to remap any projects using that workflow. And so I tell you to make sure that your team as they're working, if they don't get a task complete, talk to you, talk to the project manager of that project because the scant view is the best place to do it. Because if someone is just taking their task and updating the due date, that's not necessarily going to make any of this work kind of flow together. There's not a great way you can turn on a ClickUp, but that click app is not all that effective in terms of remapping these due dates based off those dependencies. I highly recommend you have the project manager always adjust the timeline in the Gantt view to make sure all of this work stays compact. And because you can move a task and you don't really know who you're affecting or you might be blocking someone from completing theirs, you want to make sure it all stays together in this nice sequence in this nice date map. So always make sure that the project manager, you as a project manager are coming here in the Gantt view and remapping any of these projects in here because that's the best way to do it. And so that's a great way to again deploy that work, assign it, reassign it, work on those date remapping based off of a new priority comes in, or if you have to remap it based off the client not getting back to you in time, that's the process that I would follow. In addition, the cool part about this structure that you are now building, if you're able to get all of your work built like that, I showed you how you can see progress for you as a project manager internally. But in addition, what you're able to show the clients as well is I can easily come here and I can create views. Again, I would do this at the folder level for Hannaford, but I can create a completed projects. I complete a work in progress view that essentially what I'm doing is I'm taking this And I'm just sort of grabbing all those tasks with just the parent tasks. I'm showing the progress, I'm showing due dates and the status of this. And so if we need to check in with a client every so often to show them the progress that we, that we've actually done on this specific workflow, I'd be able to show that in this view. So I create a view just like that. Again, work in progress, that's just kind of showing me that the status is not closed there. Or I can have that other view where it's the work that's actually been completed. I can create just one view for all this if I wanted to. But the only difference here is that this status is closed here, as opposed to them being open. And so each of these would actually turn into a public view. And so that's the cool part about ClickUp is you can create views for your clients that are public, so they don't even need to click up login for them to be able to see that information. I can easily go paste this, I can send this to them for them to be able to see this, to know, hey, what we've closed, what's actually open, what's the update of all of these. That way they always have it in their hands and we don't have to give them status updates all the time if we don't want to. However, what you're able to do as well is I could take that view and because I've made it a public view, I can actually come here and copy that public link. And I can also, and I have another video on this as well that I'll put in the description below on creating client portals. But if I wanted to show them all of that in one place very easily, I can come in here just like this and I can actually embed those views into a doc like this with my completed projects, with my work that's in progress, with any data that came from this, I could put meeting notes in here. Basically all that can be placed in here for me to be able to show this client, I can also make this public as well. So I would make this doc public. And essentially what happens is because all of those views, because all those docs are public, essentially what that does is now the client can see progress report, completed projects, all the data that's come from that, all in one place. Very easy for them to see the updates of all the work that we're doing for them. And again, if you're in a meeting with them, you can show them this, you can show them the Gantt view, you can walk through all of this to give them those status updates. And you're not going to have to harp on your team all the time because again, all their work is there. They have the due dates all built out, that nice timeline, they're updating their tasks, they're closing their tasks out, making it much easier for you as a project manager to manage those projects. And so that's really the main workflow in terms of getting work in the system, showing your clients and different things like that. But now I want to talk about a little bit more on the back end as a project manager, how you can actually manage sort of your team and the work that they're doing if tasks fall over due and different things like that. And so the cool part about ClickUp now is as we get all of that work into the system, I can create really nice dashboards, I can create really nice views. For me to be able to see all this work. So overdues, planned work, what's upcoming, different things like that, for me to be able to again plan better projects and timelines and things like that and just hold the team accountable to those timelines in those deadlines that we've set. And so one of the favorite dashboards that we have at Zenpilot is what we call really the, the delivery performance dashboard. This could be whatever you want it to be called. I have another video on this that I'll put in the description below as well, that really goes into this in way more detail. But I want to give you sort of the high level overview here. But essentially, as you can see here, what I'm looking at is I'm going to be looking at last week's performance and we're looking at overdue work and you're looking at this week's work in different habits across the team. And this is really my single source of truth as a project manager to manage my team and understand how well we're doing in the system and really be able to manage these projects as well. And sort of the, the main thing behind this is if you want to have daily standups, you can to be able to go through priorities and things like that. But a lot of this is going to take over that work as well. But I will show you how to run those daily standups too. But here at the highest level, as I mentioned earlier, this is last week's performance. Again, we have a bunch of different cards here that basically show us how well we did the biggest thing that we can do as a project manager as we are planning work out is we want to get better and better and better at setting due dates on those tasks and actually getting the team to complete those due dates. Because if we want to give realistic timelines to our clients, building out those process templates are the first part because it has the nice date map. But in addition to that, I also need to make sure that the team is following that due date driven methodology. Again, priorities might shift, other things might come in during the week that we need to shift some things around. So it's never going to be perfect. We want to get better and better and better at making it more and more perfect. That way we can really be do a good job at delivering realistic expectations and timelines for our clients to say, hey, we're going to get this done September 20th. We get it done September 20th. So as you can see here, essentially what this is is looking at the tasks that were planned versus the tasks that were actually complete. As you can see, we didn't do too great last week. We had five out of 10 here, we had 10 tasks that were planned, so it's not even that much. And we did not complete all those, as you can see. So there's the work that we closed here and this is the work that we did not close. And so that's by team member. I could see that information. I can also see it at the high level across everyone and then get a nice overview of here to see planned work, what was actually completed, what we actually closed on schedule in terms of the due date was on the 5th and we close it on the 5th. That's sort of what that would mean there. And then all the work that's now fallen overdue because we didn't get it done when it was supposed to get done. So again, I have a deeper dive into this dashboard that walks through all these different cards, if you want to watch that in the description below. But I'm going to give you a quick overview here. In addition, we also have sort of the time tracking as well to understand really how much we estimated for each person, how much they actually tracked and sort of the delta between those two, billable versus non billable. And then just an overall timesheet for our team there as well, just to really understand that time tracking data in the system. Also a couple other widgets just being able to understand by work category. So sort of which work category did we track time against and in which client did we track time against as well? All that information can live here. And now we dig into more of those. Okay, that's what we planned. We didn't do too great on that plan. Now because of that, what is the work that's overdue and who has a lot of work that's overdue. As you can see on the left hand side we have an overview of who's struggling the most. So Zen Pilot's not doing too great. Kevin's also not doing so great as well. And I can dig into all those tasks there too if I wanted to, to see what's actually overdue. But I also have another task list here that I can see that information right here. So as you can see, I'm able to look at it at the high level and then dig into all of that. And as we dig into this and because as I get more and more realistic of a workload view, I should really start to understand who's not doing so well in the system, who's not following that due date driven approach that we've set for the team. Because if I know if everything's in the system, we build that single source of truth and I know they had plenty of capacity to get this work done. I need to start to understand the why did you just not do it? Did something come up? Did another priority shift? We need to really figure that out so again we can continue to build and build and build better realistic expectations and timelines for our clients. So I start to understand all that. Again, build that single source of truth and click up to get that information. Can also start to understand the overdue tasks by client. So which client is really seeing the effects of us not getting this work done? Dunder Mifflin There's a chance that we're gonna have a huge client fire here. Cause we have so much overdue work for them. As you can see here in this whole website project. Maybe this work is blocked, maybe there's a reason we can't get to this website project right now. But that's kind of show me who's really struggling in terms of our clients there. Again, I can narrow all this down with filters and stuff. If you set up that filter for you to be able to see sort of that project manager, that client lead custom field that I talked about earlier, you can narrow that down with filters by just going into here, same way that views work and how I showed you that earlier. And so after we look at overdue work and we figure out sort of how we can shift that around now we need to look at this week's priorities of what's actually coming this week. Because now I need to plan my work for this week. I looked at last week, we didn't do that too well. Obviously we have to push some of those tasks into this week. But as you can see now I'm able to see what's planned this week, what we've actually closed so far. I can see that same way by each individual team member to see as we go. If I check this Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I should start to see this green, start to, to fill up there as well. And then we can look at the hours by priority, how much we've actually planned, overdue, blocked, as well as what overall, how many tasks we've actually planned for this week. So that's kind of a great way to see all that information. In addition to that, now we need to look at sort of what are those main deliverables that we should be delivering for our clients this week or this month. Whatever sort of time frame I want to look at. And as you can see, we should be finishing the pre production of our video why I Love Food Lion. We should be finishing this newsletter. We should be finishing this campaign. We've actually finished these for Hannaford, Dunn Mifflin. As you can see, we have a bunch of work to go there and that's actually overdue there. But I can again start to see all that what are, because of that, what are going to be the highest priorities for us as a team. And so now as I shift from this week's priority now if I want to, this kind of leads into the daily standup and sort of looking at this at a daily pulse kind of schedule. I can now look at just my specific team. What is the work that they need to complete today? So with this, I want to filter in really the work that's due today, the work that is overdue. And then I like to put in tomorrow as well, just because maybe they can work a little bit ahead based off of them having the capacity to take on some more work, which is. Can always be a good thing there as well. But as you can see now I'm filtering this down or grouping this by each of the people that I'm managing. I'm a project manager for essentially, or those clients, whatever filters you want to put on here, I can start to see Kevin, these are sort of his tasks that are overdue, what he needs to get done today, what are the priorities. I can kind of walk through this as a team if I want to, to set all those priorities there. So I can make sure that all the work that should be getting done is getting done by going through and creating views and dashboards like this for my team. So again, looking at those clients, we have Giant Eagle, we have Food lion here. Looks like no one on this. A team here that I'm managing has to do Dunder Mifflin work, which is probably the one that we need to prioritize because we're a little bit behind here. But as you can see, that's kind of how all of this would come together. And now the last piece that's super important to this in addition is the habit building. So one of the biggest things that we stress on at ZenPalet is if you really want to make a project management system work, you need to get the team to start building healthy habits in the system. So if we have that due date driven methodology, we need to make sure the team is completing tasks on time when the due date actually is. We also, if we want to build a single source of truth, we need to make sure the team is communicating in the system well. And so one of the big things with communication is going through your notifications, because if you don't go through your notifications, how are you supposed to actually communicate with a team in ClickUp? Because if someone's not reading their notifications, why do you want to send them a message in ClickUp if you don't think they're going to read it? So that's one of the biggest habits here. And so we can start to see that inside of ClickUp with a who's behind card like this. Because if you have a hundred unread notifications in your email inbox, there's a chance that you're not actually going to read through any of those. So that's one of the things here. As you could see, we have a bad habit forming here. For Jeff59 unread notifications, that's a big issue. Not as many unread or overdue tasks, which is good, but as you can see, you could start to pick off those there. And then another thing that you can also put in here is the move due dates. As I mentioned earlier, as a project manager, you want to start to understand who's moving those due dates without leaving any context into why they're moving it. As we move into a due date driven methodology, one thing you're going to want to make sure is that if your team has to move a due date again, I always recommend them telling you to move that in the Gantt view. But in some cases if they do move it, they should always leave a comment as to why they moved that. Did we shift a priority? Did they have to unexpectedly go out of office? Why was that not done? Make sure you leave that paper trail so we can build that story to know why this workflow was thrown off. But with that, what I want to do is I can create an activity view that basically just shows me where due dates have been moved and then I can easily see all of those in this card here for me, able to see and click into those to know, hey, was something left there? Do we leave a comment? Whatever it may be, I can see all those due date shifts right there. And so that's really the dashboard there, the single source of truth that as a project manager, you're going to want to use there. What I'd recommend, as I mentioned, you can run somewhat of daily standups as well if you want to, like for this case, for just going through today's daily pulse. And so again, this is not really jumping into any sort of Scrum Master or Agile methodology, but I would always recommend is if you have an operation space like this set up and you have your internal meetings in here, I can have one of those meetings set up for me to go through sort of a daily Scrum, whatever you want to call it. Again, that's not really because we're not. I'm not preaching Agile methodology here, but I can set this up and I can use views, I can use that dashboard for me to be able to kind of go through a progress overall. So very easy, very nice inside of ClickUp to create documents like this for those daily standups. Again, as you can see, just the progress of all those tasks. I'm basically taking views from that delivery space and embedding them into this document for me to see that in here we can go over the progress, we can go over that work. So again, sort of the team's tasks of what's overdue, due today, due tomorrow to make sure we're prioritizing this, well, we can kind of go through this one by one. Everyone can just kind of go through their work that they're prioritizing today and we can set those priorities if we need to, to say, hey, we're behind on this client project. This is what I want you to do first. I can actually go ahead and make that urgent for them to make sure that is flagged there. We could talk about overdues of what we need to get done as well. There, because we always want to get the overdue work done before we get to today's work. And then also if you have a backlog as well, I can use that here too. So what we always have inside of ClickUp is if you use something like a planning tag or a planning status, that's sort of our first status that we have here in our statuses. So if you put work into the system that's not necessarily planned out yet, it can be planning, that kind of becomes our backlog. So I can create a view just like that and embed that here for me to have. So that's kind of how you would run daily standups. Again, just have a dashboard or a document like that. You can embed views in there. That's the beauty of ClickUp is being able to use those views and having that single source of truth, truth in the system for all the information to live right there. And so now after that, really the last thing that I want to stress and talk about inside of ClickUp here is as a project manager, one of the things that you may be doing is kind of going through and managing the system, kind of some sort of quality assurance process. And so sometimes this is a ClickUp champion, but sometimes the project manager is a ClickUp champion. You may be managing those projects, but one of the biggest things too is to make sure that we're getting healthy sort of data into the system to get those healthy outputs. Because, remember, we need the right custom fields. We need time estimates on tasks, we need to make sure work's not falling over too. We need to make sure work is assigned, because if it's not assigned out, it's going to slip through the cracks. So one of the big things of the project manager is we can have another dashboard, like a workspace QA dashboard that allows us to start to see that data again. Going through things like overdue tasks to make sure that this gets remapped. And we make sure that we're going through these and making sure those timelines are up to date, that's one thing we can do. But also looking at custom fields to make sure we have all the right custom fields on these. So if we need some sort of a role custom field or a team custom field, task type or category, kind of those that I showed you in those process templates, I can create a dashboard for me to be able to make sure that those get applied to each of those tasks. So again, as a task gets in the system, we need to make sure each of them is getting the right custom field, so I'd have a dashboard for this as well. And again, I have a whole nother in depth video on this that I'll put in the description below if you want to watch that. But another great way for you to just kind of go through and make sure again, every task has a time estimate here. As you can see, it makes it very easy for me to just filter down. And that's the beauty of ClickUp is to create views like this where I can see where the time estimate isn't set and easily come here and make sure that the time gets set to make sure that that's then populated in my workload view. In addition, where there's no due date, if there's no due date, then this could potentially fall through the cracks. So I have a filter here where the due date is not set and I can easily go and make sure that this due date gets set to whatever it needs to be. So this dashboard is great for me to be able to just make sure that we're getting healthy inputs into the system to make sure that everything stays steady, stays in place, just to make sure that nothing is slipping through the cracks and making sure that the team is operating well, building those healthy habits and getting the good quality data into the system that we need to create those views, to create those dashboards and things like that. But again, that's really the main overview of the project managers and how they can use ClickUp. There's probably a lot more that we could jump into, but that's sort of an overview for you of really the main roles that resource sheet or a project manager is going to have inside of ClickUp. We went over a lot of different views and things for you to create that you can build inside of ClickUp. Definitely recommend getting all those process templates in there because those can all be super helpful and make sure that you get those status updates in the system rather than you as a project manager having to ask every five seconds for that specific status update. And so again, that's how you use ClickUp for project managers. If you have any questions about that, please leave them in the description below. Happy to jump into any more details that you might need as a project manager using ClickUp. Any additional views that you have questions about or really any other best practices. Happy to share those in another video, but please leave those in the comments section below. Otherwise, I have a couple different things for you if you want to learn a little bit more about how we at Zenpower, ClickUp's highest rated solutions partner use ClickUp in general I highly recommend I'll put this in the description below, but go download our how to Use ClickUp guide. This is over 50 pages of just basically our whole methodology, our whole implementation set up and really how to use it after that as well. Highly recommend you go ahead and download this resource. Otherwise, if you want ClickUp's highest rate solutions partner to essentially set up this whole system for you, train your team how to use it, and really build those healthy habits in the system, I highly recommend that you go to zenpilot.com call book a call with one of our experts. We'd be happy to kind of walk through your workspace right now, figure out how we can optimize that and really build you a system that's going to help you take your ClickUp to the next level. We've helped over 3,000 different agencies streamline their operations inside of ClickUp, and we love to do the same for you. And with that, I have nothing else for you today. Appreciate you watching. Thank you for all the support. I'll see you again in the next video.