Precursive OBX
Turning your Workflow into a Repeatable Playbook
Building a Task Template

(OBX) A Balancing Exercise

Learn how to best break down your workflow into the Tasks your team needs to complete when running a Precursive project. 

  • 05-Mar-2025
  • Knowledge
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Title
(OBX) A Balancing Exercise
URL Name
A-Balancing-Exercise
Body

Video Lesson

Lesson Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll have:
  • Broken down your projects into a set of Tasks
  • Started building your first Task Template

A Matter of Balance

Now that you know how many Precursive Board Types you will need to create for your team, we can start tackling them one by one and create a Task Template for each one. In this lesson we are going to break down your workflow into the Tasks your team needs to complete when running a Precursive project. 
 
Now, there are different ways you can break down a workflow. For example, you can decide to have 3 different Tasks for managing a Kick-off call: ‘Scheduling Kick-off Call’, ‘Kick Off Call’ and ‘Sending Kick-off Call Follow Up’. Or you can have just one single ‘Kick Off’ Task that you can mark as complete once the follow up has been sent. 
 
Is there a Best Practice? Not really - it depends on what works best for your team. You may want to provide them with as much information as possible to make sure no steps are missed and they know exactly what they have to do to complete an onboarding project. Or you may prefer to save them some time when managing a project and have a reduced list of Tasks.
 
It’s all a matter of balance - the more Tasks you create, the more time the project managers will spend updating their boards, logging time and completing Tasks. The key is to find a good balance between clarity and the admin time that needs to be spent managing a board.
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Balancing Tasks Out - Knowing your Tools

Think about all that is going on in each team when onboarding a new customer. How does the Sales team handle the handover to the implementation manager? What does s/he need to do to implement the purchased product correctly? Is the CS team involved in the onboarding process? What steps are they responsible for?
 
You can use this Blank Task Template to start listing down all the necessary steps under the ‘Name’ column. Each entry will result in a Precursive Task that your team will have to complete. 
 
If you want to prevent them from spending too much time completing Tasks on the board without compromising the clarity of what should happen each step of the way, there are a couple of features that you can use:
  1. Task Checklist Items - you can add checklist items to a Task for the minor steps that you want your team to remember. These will not appear on the Board as Tasks, but will be visible when clicking on the Task and will look like a to-do list that you can check items off. 
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In your Task Template, enter each item in the ‘Checklist’ column of a and separate them by a #. Example: Schedule internal meeting#Schedule KO Call#Send KO Follow Up
  1. Detail - in this column you can insert a description for each Task. That could include a step-by-step guide on how to complete it or even a link to a document that needs to be filled or sent to a customer for example. This will also be visible when clicking on a Task.
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Both these tools can help you reduce the amount of Tasks that your project manager will have to manage on a Precursive Board without compromising the clarity of the process and risking missing out important steps.

Referencing Your Work

Once you have completed your spreadsheet with a list of Tasks and have filled the ‘Checklist’ and ‘Detail’ columns where necessary, it’s time for the last step of this lesson: assigning your Tasks a unique value in the ‘Reference’ column. 
 
These values will become a suffix to the Salesforce Record Id generated automatically when the task is created from a template. And you can then use it to create time dependencies between Tasks or group them under a Parent Task to improve visibility on the Board, as we are going to see in the next lesson.
 
Make sure each Reference on the template is UNIQUE - but keep it short and simple, and under 80 characters long. You can use either letters or numbers.

Final Review!

After completing all the steps of this lesson, your spreadsheet should look something like this:
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It’s now time to review the steps with your team and make sure nothing has been missed out.

Additional Resources

What's Next?

Building Parent Tasks & Time Dependencies.
 
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