Annual School Operations Calendar

dbl

Can anyone recommend a format for an annual calendar for our school operations team? What I'm trying to create is a document to input all school activities for the year and plotting each department's tasks for each job.  

 

For example: School Open Day: events showing each department's tasks to achieve effective outcome.  So for this it would need to plot the tasks for   facilities, marketing, IT , maintenance and administration.  Also estates managment requirements throughout the year would be key.

 

I'd want everyone to be able collaborate on the document.

 

Be grateful for any suggestions

Admin@PAT

Hi dbl

Sounds like a good old fashioned Project Chart with Gantt setting is what you are after. This is fully customisable and you have great options to delegate and differentiate tasks and allocations to groups, individuals etc.

 

Have a play around with teh templates that are on offer and sewhat you think. Think of the school year as a PROJECT to be broken down into tasks for each Month-Term-Semester - you should comfortably get a whole year on a sheet...

dbl

Right.   Have never used these sheets before so and not greatly IT literate, so will see what I can get together.  Thank you.

Tony Davidson - SmartSheet Certified User 2016

Hi dbl..if you need some assistance there are plenty of partners that offer that type of setup support and even Smartsheet offers this type of consultation service.  if you would like to explore that just let me know and I can point you to a few options.  Tony

Admin@PAT

Hi again,

Have a poke around on Youtube and the Smartsheet Webinars (you will find the Webinars link below in the blue footer on this page). There is also Videos, worksheet and guides galore in the Help/Support Centre. 

While these mig thbe quite involved, it will offer a great visual tool to give  yu an idea on how to VISUALISE what you want to achieve.

Project settings can be tricky to navigate, so keep it simple and make it work for you, not the other way around. 

 

To begin I would look to open a new Sheet using a Project with Dependancies template form the Home Tab across the top of your page. 

Keep all of the settings and formatting so you can really see what is going on and how each task (Sports Carnival, Family Day, Band Performance etc in your case) is relative to the whole task (in your case the School Year). 

Each Task has subtask:

Sports DAy 2017 - main task (Parent Row/Task)

  Ground preparations

  Book Bus for travelling Students

  Purchase additional Stop watches

  Order additional Icy Poles for Canteen

^^^^^^^^^^^^ - these are all Sub tasks (Child tasks), you can also move into further details with GrandChild tasks

 

You can allocate who the task if assigned to

the Due date for the subtasks (in a project template the Parent row Due Date will be influenced by the duration of the children tasks)

You can set reminders, ask for an update request, send yourself alerts when people action or update their tasks so yu can keep good visibility on the 'project' as a whole.

You can attach quotes from vendors so everyone can review and respond, you can add comments to the task if you call and leave a message for someone etc. 

 

Once you establish these fundamental points, you can then look further into 'dependancies' - this basically means that one task is dependant on another task. For example Sports Day is depndant on Ground Maintenance  - if Ground Mainteneance is delayed, this will push out the date of Sports Day 2017 (which sounds a bit extreme) but the concept is that things happen in an order, some are depandent on other tasks being cmpleted, while something like buy icy poles, isn't dependant on ground maintenance, so this will not be affected by ground maintenance delays, but might be affected if Fundraising is delayed or the due date passes.

 

There is so much to learn, and even more once you have learnt what you need to know. Don't be afraid to simply give it a go. Watch some youtube videos, have a good look around the Help Centre here and play with teh teplate so you understand how and why it works so well.