The FASTEST Way to Document Agency Processes

Hey all, it's Jeff from Zen Pilot. I want to talk today about how you can best leverage AI when you're building and documenting your processes. So I've built a ton of different processes for different businesses and it can take a lot of time, but it is a huge step and necessary for any business's growth. This way you can get work delegated to the rest of your team. You can have them follow your instructions as well as just making sure they're following best practices so you can deliver repeatable and great results for your clients. So this is a huge step. If I can leave you with one big piece of advice, it's next time you do anything, whether it's building, designing a website, whether you're running an SEO audit, make sure you record yourself via Loom Vidyard. There's a lot of other tools out there. Record yourself doing it and give instructions to someone like a beginner that's coming in and doing it for the first time. That way you're going to create a great asset that you can put into any specific task in a project management tool. And, and they, once they get assigned that task, they will have those step by step instructions right there for them to complete it and they will follow your best practices. So do that. That's going to help you out so much and create a lot of great resources for your team to follow. In addition, you can use a tool like Scribe that'll record your screen and put together a nice SOP document for you that you can also leverage to use for your team. So make sure you do those things next time you're doing something. Record it, use Scribe, use Loom, use Vidyard, any other tool to make sure you're documenting that specific step for your team to quickly walk through this spreadsheet first and then how I actually transfer this into ClickUp. You can obviously transfer into any other project management tool that you have, but want to kind of walk you through the process just to help out. This spreadsheet is a template that I created that I will be including with this video. So if you want it, you better get your hands on it. It's definitely very helpful in all the prompts and everything is built within it with a Chrome extension that you can use and leverage just to make this process way faster. So first of all, obviously the first step is figuring out what you want to actually create. So I'm going to be doing this specific deliverable is going to be a blog post. I want to create the workflow and all the process of how to complete this blog post. Second step is going to be your tasks. What are the tasks that are needed to complete this blog post? So maybe you have no idea where to start. You're sitting there and you're like, I'm not really sure. I think it's start generating the strategy, whatever that probably is the first step. But let's say we need some help on this and we need to just start generating something to help me start thinking about the tasks that are needed to complete this. So what I can do is I can come over here and if I need some help, I can say, okay, how many steps do I think this is going to take? Let's say 15 steps and then I can generate the tasks for me and that's going to start generating over here. So now I'll be able to sort of see a workflow of how to complete a blog post for either my company or for one of my customers. So we'll let that load and you'll see that generates 15 steps here. So first one, determine customer requirements, develop a project plan, allocate resources, set up systems and infrastructure needed, research, relevant data and information. So a lot of these we might be able to just combine into one step and then create a checklist from those. So if you see a lot of these that are like maybe just 10 minute tasks or 5 minute tasks and we complete it super quick, we might be able to combine those into one. Just say, hey, this is determine the requirements and plan out the strategy. That might be one step. And then we can just put that as a 30 minute to an hour long task. And then all these other things within it could be a checklist. So that's something to think about. But let's say that this is, it's pretty good. I want to take that and I'm going to put over here just so I can start working on it. Now I'll want to make sure I go through and edit this a little bit just so it fits my workflow. But this is just a good way for me to get started. So I'm going to click pause this video and just edit it so you don't have to watch that whole process. Okay, so now I have all of my steps that I need. This fits our workflow, we're good to go. And the next step, what I can do is I can go through all these and start adding time estimates as well as the role. So let's say I'm just going to go through time estimate for this one. This one might only be 30 minutes. This one might be, let's say an hour and then I'm going to go on through all of these and then I'm going to choose the role. Might not be a one to one relationship, it just might be. Okay, who is the proofer when they complete this or who is the strategist when they complete this? So this doesn't necessarily need to be tied to one person in your business. This could be tied to multiple people. But again, what hat are they wearing when they complete the specific step? So I'll go through and let's say that this is the strategist that completes that. Maybe the copywriter is the one that's going to be completing the blog outline, the interview. Let's say that that's the strategist as well. They're also completing the interview log copy. Let's say the copywriter is doing that. So you're going to go through all these, add all the roles as well as the time estimate. Again, I'll pause so you don't have to watch all that process. Okay, so now we have all of our time estimates, our roles and our tasks. We've gotten the bare bones really of our process, all the workflows built out. Now it's time to start thinking more detail. So we want to get the instructions of okay, strategist. This is how you complete the block strategy as well as maybe here's some additional documentation or a template that we might have on how to do that that you'll want to fill out every time. So we want to make sure all that's included in our workflow so that we can just make sure again everyone's following best practices and does it correctly. So what I want to do here now is once I have all that information, I'm going to come over to this and I can choose. Okay. For this specific step right here. Let's go a little bit more. I have the blog strategy in document in the para task notes. What is the instruction type that I want? Let's say I want step by step instructions. Now I can go over here just to the same process that I did when I generated those tasks. I'm going to say yes. So again, red light, green light. If I don't like it, then I can click no and then back into yes. But let's just let this generate some instructions for us. And while that does it, you also have the ability to generate some resources. So let's say we want maybe a few articles or videos that are out there that we think would be helpful. We can gather those by generating the resources just like this, same exact process as we followed. And that'll generate these resources over here. We'll just get like two to three, and then I can use, I can look to see, okay, this is good. It's not so good, but maybe just some information out there that I can use or just use it for brainstorming my own description as well. So now what I want to do is I'm going to take these task instructions. Let's say I like this. I think this is pretty good. What I can do is copy that and I'm going to paste it into these instructions. And so now I'm going to have to go through and I'm going to edit this so that it makes most sense for my team and how we do things. But I have a good starting point for how I'm actually going to do this. And so what you want to do is you're going to want to go step by step adding in instructions. You can also add in the resources there too. And then if you have any additional documentation, if you have templates out there, like spreadsheet templates that your team might use for some of this, put that there as well, because that's going to be super useful for the team. So I'm going to go through all this step by step. Won't make you watch that, but I'm going to generate all my task instructions to get everything ready to go in this spreadsheet before I move it over to ClickUp. Okay, so let's say now I have all my tasks, my time estimate, my roles, my instructions, and all the documentation that I would need. And I'm ready to go to transfer this into my project management platform. Now this is what we can do. And I'm going to transfer into ClickUp for you to see. So first up is going to be copying obviously our deliverable name. This is going to be ClickUp. This is going to be our parent task. So I would highly recommend you have a process library that you build all these out in ClickUp. That's going to be a great place to store all of your source files for these to be turned into ClickUp templates. There's going to be a lot more videos that we're going to create on that. But just so you know, just make sure you have some of process library in your ClickUp space workspace for you to store all of these source files. So one, we're going to have our blog post that's gonna be the first step, I'm gonna put that right in there. And then I'm gonna actually start generating all the tasks for this. As you can see, we have our due dates, our time estimates, and deliver roles that we're also gonna build out in here too. So now I'm gonna go back here and what I'm gonna do is take all of my tasks just like this. I need to copy all of them all the way down to schedule blog publish date. I'm going to copy those. And this is a super cool feature of ClickUp that now what I can do, create a subtask like this. And I'm going to paste all of these in here. So Command V, Control V. And you'll see, once I paste all those in here, we have multiple lines detected. So instead of me having to go one by one and create all these tasks, I can now add these 16 tasks just like that. So those will get added. And next up, what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to start adding in our due dates, our time estimates and deliverables as well. Okay, so I'm getting the end of my time estimates. These we're just going to do one by one, but we'll do 15 minutes there, 15 minutes here. So after we finish our time estimates, we're good to go. We need to start adding in the due dates and the roles, which this deliver role custom field is going to be the role that we had in that spreadsheet. So what I'm going to do is you can put your spreadsheet as well as this side by side and I can actually use my multitask toolbar in ClickUp. That'll allow me to easily edit this pretty quickly. So let's say we have our blog strategy, our blog interview, proofing, revisions, producing it in the CMS confirm approval, schedule, a date. These are all going to be my strategist easily like that. As you can see, I added all those in one. Okay, so now we have our copywriter. Copywriter say all these are the copywriter that's going to be the designer. Come back up here, type in copywriter to find the copywriter. Just like that. We'll save it and then you'll want to do the rest too. So after you get your time estimates and deliver roles, the next step you can do is start adding these due dates. So I'm going to go into the Gantt view. This is the easiest spot to add them in. I'll pull down my blog post and we can Just start creating the task. So let's just say we're going to do them today just for this template we can remap in the future. And I want about these to be typically one day apart. Except for some of them we'll have the same day, but we like to just give some flexibility for our team. And these can be remapped after the template is deployed as well as I can also remap them later too, even after it's deployed. So let's just do, let's just put together this date map, send blog to client for review. Let's just say that the client's going to take more than one day to reply to us typically what happens? So we'll put an extra date there and then the rest we'll just do a nice easy date map. And then when this final deliverable is complete, which is our parent task, we will make that lined up with the last subtask. And then also in addition, you're going to want to add in all your dependencies too. So go through. If you're in the gantt view, you can easily start adding in these dependencies just like this. Very easy process. Okay, so now my last dependency. I'm just going to take this and we'll block this parent task. So now we have a nice workflow built out in ClickUp. As you can see, if I take this, I can remap the whole process. It's all going to come together. So all my due dates are going to stay consistent because I build those dependencies in here. So let's just drag that back here again. I can always choose the parent task due date when I actually say this is a template and deploy it. So that way this can be fully remapped and we'll keep that date map after that. What we want to do is we're going to go one by one through and we're going to start adding in our task descriptions on how to actually complete these. So what I can do is I'm going to bring in my process builder and I'm going to go up here. Let's say I have my instructions here, I'm going to copy that. And now I'm going to go into step one just like this. Add a description command V and now we have all our steps. So if I need to adjust the formatting or anything to make it a little bit better, I can do that as well. Or maybe you even want click of AI to take a look at it. I can edit with AI can make it better If I need to fix spelling and grammar, things like that, there's always your option to do this as well to see if there's any way to make it a little bit better. But let's just say we're good with it. We don't need that. But if you want to, feel free to. And we're going to discard it just like that. So now you're going to want to go through one by one and just add all those in there. If you have a checklist, what you can do is if I were to take this and say one of these was a checklist, if you have again multiple lines, you can copy that into the checklist down here, just like that. And that would allow you to, just like we did with the subtasks, create multiple checklist items very easily. But this one's also description. So I'm just going to add that in there as well. I can get rid of that, adjust my formatting and there we go. So now we are almost done. Once we get all of our task descriptions in here, our checklist items as well, we have our due dates, our time estimates, our role dependencies and everything set up now I can actually save this as a template in ClickUp and that's going to bring all of this as well as the descriptions that so that I can deploy it for my team to use. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come over here and let's go in the template center. Let's say this as a template and this is going to be blog post just like that. It's going to be for all members. If you want to use a description or tags to help you kind of sort and just say what this is. This blog post seems pretty self explanatory. You can customize included items. If I don't want to bring watchers in there, especially so that I'm not watching every task that gets deployed and I'll save it just like that. And then from there what we're able to do is say we are in delivery and we actually have a blog post for Dunder Mifflin. I can come here and go into my templates, browse templates, find my blog post, go into the task templates, find my blog post just like that. This is Andrew's version, use this template and this is where I can remap the dates, parent task, due date is. Let's say this is going to be Due on the 31st, use a template. And now everything that I just built is going to come with this and easily allow me to assign it, remap it, and everything's built in there for the team to use. Yeah. Okay. So now you'll see that the blog post has loaded. The due date is now May 31st. All of our tasks are in there, as well as the date map with the time estimates. I mean, if I go into here, you'll see that we have our deliver roles in there as well. So if I want to use those deliver rules to actually start assigning this work, I could create a view that just sorts them or groups them by deliver role. It allows me to easily take all the strategist tasks, just like that. And let's say I'm the strategist for this task. I need to find the assignee. It's over here. Assign it to me just like that. So now I've assigned myself to all of the strategist tasks. So if I go back here, not the podcast episode, but you'll see all the tasks that were for the strategists are now assigned to me. So that makes it super easy. You'll just go through one by one, just like that. And now for the copywriter, you can do the same process that you just did. But that is how you build a process with AI, use it for your team, easily assign it, and really make everything and everyone more productive, more efficient inside of ClickUp or whatever project manager tool you have. Hopefully this is helpful. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments. Love to help out any way that we can. Thank you.