I am a Senior Professional Services Consultant at Cloud Coach. I help clients and organizations get set up with Cloud Coach during the implementation process - and I use our own product to help do it! Here’s how.

Cross Project View

Typically, I ‘favorite’ all of the active projects I’m working on, so I can see them all in one place at the start of my day. Each of these projects has been created from a template, based on the contract that was sold. If we click into one of these projects, you can see the phases and tasks that have been added as part of the project template. Not having to enter individual tasks at the start of a project saves me hours of unnecessary administrative time for every project I’m working on.

Managing Individual Projects

This view enables me to see, at a glance, what is going to be required throughout an implementation. We can also easily drill down to get more information quickly. You’ll be able to see a little icon next to the ‘Requirements Kanban’ task in the Gantt view. When we click that, it takes us into a Kanban Board, outlining the project’s build requirements. Each card will contain a specific description of what needs to be created, any updates based on feedback and testing, and also includes information on testing steps, thanks to a template within the card. The kanban process is simple. Each card starts in the far left of the board, in the ‘To Do’ section, and is dragged and dropped across the board as and when tasks are completed.

External Project Views

A large part of my role involves working with customers and our External Project View provides the ideal way to collaborate. As you can see in the image above, the customer is able to see the progress of all cards.

UAT Testing

We have built a custom feature internally for when a feature hits the UAT stage, enabling us to manage the process entirely through Cloud Coach. As you can see in the screenshot a few paragraphs above, a series of cards are in the ‘Client Review’ section. This view in the External Project View allows customers to create a new, or update an existing, ticket. The tickets above all correspond with a matching card in the Kanban view. Customers are able to click into each of these tickets and either sign off on UAT (at which point I receive a notification and can move the Kanban card to ‘Complete’) , or alternatively, customers can create a new ticket if something is not working as expected. The whole process is managed from within Cloud Coach and has removed the need to use spreadsheets or any other form of documentation, while allowing us to immediately access valuable additional project information and context from one, standardized area. Importantly, this also hugely reduces the number of emails that need to be sent: everyone is working from the same place, with access to the same information, and able to communicate directly onto the relevant tickets. With so many stakeholders involved, it shocks me that some organizations are still using Excel Spreadsheets to run processes like this. Without Cloud Coach, it has the potential to get very confusing, very quickly.

Meetings

As someone who spends a lot of their time in dialogue with customers, I also regularly use the Meetings section within Cloud Coach. In here I can see a list of all the customer meetings that I’ve attended, see when they took place, and also record meeting notes and actions. There’s also the ability to send meeting notes to customers using the External Project View - so the meeting app is incredibly useful for a client-facing role like mine. In fact, with such a large number of meetings, it’s probably the most used Cloud Coach feature for me on a day-to-day basis!

Time Entry

As I spend a lot of time working on customer projects, it’s critically important to enter customer time accurately. Some of the projects I work on are ‘fixed fee’, so all time is logged against a retainer. Entering time is a simple process. Let’s take this ‘Project Initiation’ card for example. You can see from the face on the card that I’ve assigned this to one of my colleagues. When we click in, you can see his time has been entered directly onto the card. I can enter my time directly onto cards like we see above. I also enter my time on an individual task level, from the Gantt view.

Project Time Overview

Ensuring project time is entered is one challenge. Making sure it’s been added to the correct project is another! Thankfully, we have a Project Time view, which gives me the ability to see what time has been entered, by who, and against what project. In the rare instances where time has been recorded incorrectly, it’s very easy for me to spot and rectify with our team.

External Deliverables

After requirements gathering sessions with customers, I need a way to both record and assign out actions: fortunately Cloud Coach helps me with that, too! As you can see here, I’ve added the actions required, added due date information, flagged the priority order, and also assigned tasks out to individuals. This sits independently from the information stored at the Gantt level we saw earlier, and instead works like a checklist, where I can simply toggle a green tick when each of these items have been completed. External stakeholders, when assigned tasks, are able to access this checklist and can also toggle when a task has been completed. In fact, this demonstrates just how integral Cloud Coach is for my role as a Professional Services Consultant. All the information I possibly need to manage implementations is just a few clicks away, ensuring everyone is on the same page, whether that’s internal or external stakeholders. With that framework in place, it makes the implementation process run so much more smoothly!