Part 3 — Run Your Operation · Chapter 22

Projects at Scale: Rollouts & Imports

Everything so far scales to dozens by hand. This chapter is for hundreds. The national chain that signs Beacon for work across three hundred locations, or, at our example’s size, Harbor Grill onboarding all twelve sites at once. The techniques are the same at both scales, and they reduce to one idea: spreadsheets in, work orders out, pipeline visible.

The tool is the Import / Export Center, which appears at several scopes: Setup for company data, the customer, the project, asset types, inventory. Rollouts live in the project’s center. Part 4 holds the complete reference for every import type. This chapter is the playbook.

How the imports behave

Every import follows the same shape. Download the type’s spreadsheet layout, fill it, upload, review what BigWave understood, commit. Rows match on your external IDs, which is where chapter 8’s Site ID field earns its keep, and imports distinguish creating records from updating existing ones. Exports are the same spreadsheets in reverse, so an export, edited and re-imported, is a bulk edit. That round-trip is the power tool this chapter keeps reaching for. The center keeps a history of what was run, and the Part 4 reference covers administering it.

The rollout playbook

Harbor Grill onboarding, step by step. Scale the numbers up tenfold and nothing changes.

1. Set the project up first. Chapter 9’s whole checklist: statuses, custom fields, the work order template, deliverables, alerts, rates, copied from the template project. Imports multiply whatever exists, mistakes included, so the setup review happens before the first upload.

2. Import sites. The customer sends their location list. Map it onto the sites spreadsheet, Site ID and address and contacts, import at the customer level, and twelve sites exist, correctly numbered. Or three hundred. Site custom field values, gate codes and manager names, can ride in with them or import separately.

3. Create work orders in bulk. Project Setup/Create Work Order(s): select the sites, pick the inspection template, generate. Every site now has its work order, pre-filled, in the first status. For odder shapes, work order details import from spreadsheets too.

4. Import the schedule. When visit dates are negotiated up front, and rollouts usually are, fill the schedule spreadsheet and import. Every work order gets its schedule entry in one pass instead of three hundred calendar edits.

5. Import assignments. Same again for who. The assignment import places techs, yours and partners’, onto the scheduled entries. Confirmation from chapter 16 then tracks acknowledgment at scale.

6. Adding sites later. Chains open new locations mid-contract. Import the additions the same way, new rows in the same spreadsheet, bulk-create their work orders, done. The playbook is reusable per wave, not per project.

Residential (the Okafors): none of this. The point of the shared Residential Service project is that homeowners arrive one phone call at a time. Rollout machinery on a project that gains three work orders a day is ceremony.

Watching the pipeline: Site Tracking

The project’s Site Tracking screen is the rollout’s scoreboard. Work orders counted by status, each count clicking through to its list. “Inspection Due 3, Scheduled 5, Report Submitted 2, PO Received 1, Invoiced 1” is the whole engagement’s state in one line, and it’s what chapter 7 was preparing for when it insisted statuses model the gates that matter. Customer logins can see their own pipeline view, which for a rollout customer replaces the weekly status spreadsheet someone used to assemble by hand.

Issue tracking

Rollouts generate loose ends. The site that failed, the damaged fixture, the punch-list item that isn’t a work order of its own yet. The project’s issue tracking handles these. Define Issue Types in Project Setup, Failed Inspection and Access Problem and Damage Found, log issues against work orders as they arise, and the project’s Reporting screen carries an Issues Summary with counts by type and state, plus an Issues Details grid of open items. Issue alerts, chapter 13, fire on any issue or on specific types, so a failed inspection pings Marcus the minute Tom logs it.

Issues are the difference between a rollout that closes clean and one that ends with a “wait, what happened at Fremont?” email thread three weeks after demobilization.

Checklist

  1. Freeze project setup before the first import. Multiply only what’s correct.
  2. Insist on the customer’s own location IDs in the site import, and keep them stable forever.
  3. Import in the playbook’s order: sites, then work orders, then schedule, then assignments.
  4. Do a five-row pilot import before each three-hundred-row real one.
  5. Put Site Tracking on a screen in the office for the duration. A visible pipeline changes behavior.
  6. Open issues the moment loose ends appear, and drive the Issues Summary to zero as the exit criterion.