Part 2 — Set Up Your Company · Chapter 9

Projects: Your Lines of Work

Chapter 1 made the argument: a project is a line of work, and every operational rule in BigWave hangs off one. This chapter builds them. Expect to spend real time here during onboarding. Project setup is where BigWave goes from generic to yours.

Deciding what projects to create

Ask of each candidate: does this work run differently? Different statuses, different paperwork, different rates, different fields to capture? Different answers mean different projects. Same answers mean the same project, even across hundreds of customers.

The three standard shapes:

  1. A shared service project per broad category of ad-hoc work. Beacon’s Residential Service holds every homeowner. Commercial Service holds ad-hoc business calls.
  2. A dedicated contract project when one customer’s work has its own rules. Harbor Grill Annual Inspections exists because of its statuses, close-out paperwork and contract rates.
  3. A rollout project for a large, finite program of work across many sites. Chapter 22 runs one end to end.

Creating a project

Home/Manage/Projects, then add. Name the project, connect it to a customer where it’s customer-specific, and you land in Project Setup. A shared project like Residential Service isn’t tied to one customer, and work orders in it pick their customer and site at creation.

Project Setup, panel by panel

The screen has two groups. Initialization is about creating work orders. Other is everything the work orders will obey.

Initialization

Work Order Templates. A template pre-fills new work orders: description, instructions to the tech, expected duration, deliverables. Define one per repeatable job type. Beacon’s inspection project has exactly one, Annual Panel & Emergency Lighting Inspection, and every generated inspection work order starts complete instead of blank. Templates are the difference between “create 12 work orders” being an afternoon and being a click.

Create Work Order(s). Make work orders in bulk. Pick sites, pick a template, generate. This is how twelve inspection work orders appear at once.

Delete Work Orders. Bulk removal of work orders created in error. It respects history. Use it for cleanup after a botched import, not for hiding real work.

Copy From Project. Pulls setup from an existing project into this one: statuses, custom fields, templates, alerts. This enables the template-project pattern. Keep one never-used project named something like TEMPLATE - Rollout, tuned to perfection, and copy from it whenever a real one starts. Ten minutes of setup instead of two hours, and consistency for free.

Import / Export Center. The project-scoped importer: sites onto the project, work orders, schedules, assignments, custom field values, pricing. Chapter 22 lives here.

Other (the rules)

  • Statuses / Tags. This project’s status list, seeded from Status Defaults in chapter 7, plus its project-level tags.
  • Custom Fields. Work order fields for this project only. Chapter 10.
  • Alerts. Who gets notified of what, per chapter 13. Alert definitions belong to projects, which is why “notify the facilities manager on completion” can be true for Harbor Grill and false for residential.
  • Document Templates and Document Folders. Project-specific generated documents, such as the inspection report, and the folder structure. Chapter 12.
  • Deliverables. Required documents per work order, tracked as “3 of 5 complete” on every work order and reportable project-wide. Harbor Grill’s signed report is a deliverable, which is what makes “which sites still owe paperwork” a glance instead of an audit. Chapter 12.
  • Issue Types. The categories for punch-list issue tracking. Chapter 22.
  • Preferred Materials. The subset of the materials database this project’s line entry favors, so techs pick from thirty relevant parts instead of three thousand. Chapter 11.
  • Project Options. The project’s switch panel: defaults for new work orders, what portal users may see and do, invoicing behavior, and scheduling level, meaning whether jobs schedule as one block or as activities and tasks. Walk it slowly when you create your first real project. Most switches point at a chapter elsewhere in this manual.
  • Project Reports and Report Windows. Saved reporting configuration and recurring reporting periods. Chapter 23.
  • Project Team. Who runs this project. Team members get the project in My Projects, can be workflow queue targets, and one is designated project manager, the default owner for escalations. Comments and Asset Scheduling round out the list, chapters 15 and 20.

The project’s other screens

Setup is one of several views onto a project. Details holds the project’s information, its Contract (rates and billing arrangement, chapter 11), documents and audit trail. Site Tracking shows the work order pipeline counted by status. Tag Report counts by tag. Reporting is a bundle of operational reports, and Workflows lists workflows riding this project. Chapters 22 and 23 use those screens hard.

Beacon walkthrough

Commercial (Harbor Grill): Marcus creates Harbor Grill Annual Inspections against the Harbor Grill customer. He copies setup from Beacon’s inspection template project, adjusts two statuses, sets the PO-required option, attaches the inspection report document template, defines the signed-report deliverable, builds the one work order template, and puts Priya and himself on the team with himself as project manager. About twenty minutes, most of it spent rereading his own template project’s choices.

Residential (the Okafors): nobody creates anything. Residential Service was configured once, months ago. The Okafors’ work order inherits all of it at creation, which is the whole payoff of the line-of-work model.

Checklist

  1. List your lines of work on paper. Aim for fewer projects than you first think.
  2. Design Status Defaults (chapter 7) before creating any real project.
  3. Build one project completely, then clone it into a TEMPLATE project before it accumulates real work orders.
  4. Create a work order template for every job type you do more than weekly.
  5. Assign a project manager to every project, shared ones included. Escalations need a name.