Automated Dreams

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Disclosure: This blog post contains links to one or more of our advertisers’ products. We might receive compensation when you click on links to those products. To learn more, visit our advertising policy page.


teamwork-projects.jpg

Without the suite of tools that Teamwork offers, our company quite literally would not be able to operate the way it does today. We utilize Teamwork Projects, Chat, Desks, & Spaces for just about everything we do.

I’ve tried so many Project Management tools. And by tried, I donʼt mean signing up for a free trial and playing around with it, but actually trying it for months to make it work for our company.

If the appeal of Asana has finally worn off, and youʼre starting to notice more of what it “canʼt” do. If you got caught up in Trelloʼs shiny board view only to realize thatʼs all it really is… a shiny board. Or, perhaps youʼre lost inside of Basecamp, going in circles.

After trying Teamwork Projects, here we are almost 3 years later. We use it to run all of our internal and external projects and have dug deep into the rest of Teamwork’s native tools & platforms. And just about every day I find myself  saying, “It can do that, too!?”

Okay, you get it – I think Teamwork is great. Rave done.

If you are a current user of Teamwork or are contemplating a switch to a new Project Management software, then let’s dive in.

Automating Teamwork Boards to Streamline Your Content Creation & Review

This is only a fraction of what all this feature can do for you.

We are going to go ahead and walk through an actual use case and show you how we are utilizing this feature at Automated Dreams for our social media posts in particular. We also use it for email content, landing page content, blogs, and more… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Step  1. Create Your Board Columns

Our default is: In Progress, In Review, Approved, Posted, and Declined.

Depending on how in-depth you want to get, some other board columns we could add here are: Revision Requested, Waiting for More Info/Blocked, Ideation Stage, etc…

When choosing your colors, make sure you stick to a progressive spectrum (e.g. yellow,  orange, red, green, blue), that way your team can follow it easier by color.

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Step  2. Establish Column Settings

Add Triggers

Triggers are actions that will occur to a task/card once it has been moved into this particular column.

Here is the list of possible board column  triggers:

  • Add subtasks
  • Modify properties
  • Modify assignees
  • Autocomplete
  • Modify dates
  • Modify tags
  • Modify estimated time
  • Auto archive completed cards
  • Modify task list
  • Send custom notification

Whew! Thatʼs quite a lot you can do, and when you choose an action there is even more inside of it that you can define. But let’s go through our columns to show you.

In Progress

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Trigger: Modify properties >> Progress >> Set to 0%

This means that whenever a card is added to this column, which we do later on automatically, it is set to a 0% progress. Thatʼs it. We donʼt have to do much more, because our content creator doesnʼt take too much time to create a social media post.

In Review

111.jpg

Trigger 1: Modify assignees >> Replace assignees >> Assign to editor

Trigger 2: Send custom notification >> All assignees >> Message:  “Social Media post ready to be reviewed.”

When our content creator is finished with their post, they manually move the card over to the “In Review” column.  This automatically reassigns the card to our editor and sends a custom notification via email and also notifies you in Teamwork that it is ready for their review.

If you prefer, you could also add additional triggers to update the progress, update time estimates, and add an additional tag “In Review.” Yes, the possibilities are endless, but this is enough usually.

Approved

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Trigger 1: Modify assignees >> Replace assignees >> Assign to the person that posts

Trigger 2: Send custom notification >> All assignees >> Message:  “Social Media Post has been approved.”

Assuming that our content creator did an amazing job — which of course, they always do — then our editor will make any minor adjustments they need inside of the card and then move it to the “Approved” column.

This automatically reassigns the card again to the person responsible for posting on our social media and also sends them a custom notification letting them know there is a new approved post in the column.

If you want, you could add additional triggers to update the progress, add a subtask from a template to “Upload post to Facebook”, add an additional tag “Approved”, etc.

Has been posted

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Trigger 1: Modify tags >> Add/Remove tags >> add “Posted” tag >> Remove “declined post” tag

Trigger 2: Modify Dates >> Due Date >> Change to “Current Day”

Trigger 3: Auto Complete >> Complete By >> User who moves task

Trigger 4: Send custom notification >> Send to manager/editors >> Customize message

Once the person responsible for posting has gone ahead and done so, they move the card to the “Has been posted” board column which does quite a lot.

We have the triggers add/remove tags rather than replace them, because there may be other important tags on the card that we donʼt want to overwrite. For example, we also use tags that denote which day of the week they go out and would like to search by that later on.

We set the due date to today even though the task has been completed automatically by the next trigger, so we have yet another thing to search by later on if we needed to track down a post quickly.

I also like to be notified when things are posted, which is why I have a custom notification.

Declined

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Trigger 1: Modify assignees >> Replace assignees >> Assign to content creator

Trigger 2: Modify Tags >> Replace tags >> Add “declined post” tag

Trigger 3: Send custom notification >> All assignees >> Message:  “Social Media post has been DECLINED”

Very rarely we get a post that comes along that we’d have to decline outright, but it is better to be prepared when that time comes. So, we make sure that by moving a card into the “Declined” column, we do a few things.

We let the content creator know, overwrite all tags to have “declined post”, and then send a note to the content creator letting them know.

You could also add a trigger to auto archive and/or complete, clear out the progress fields, or set the priority to urgent if it is something you want them to see right away.

So, you could stop right here if this is all you wanted to take on, and you were fine just working in the board view. However, we take it a few steps further to automate our process… because it is in our name.

Step  3. Add Task Lists and Set Their Defaults

This may not apply to the way your social media calendar works, but we have a distinct post theme for each day of the week and find it helpful to have a dedicated task list for each. This does create a little more work in the setup, but it saves endless time.

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Next, we set the “Defaults” for the Task List. What this means is that every time you create a task under this list, certain default settings will already be pre-filled and selected for you.

Let’s dive into what we do:

Set the default assignee to our content creator.

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Add a format to the task description with information that needs to be filled in every time for this particular list.

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Create/Add Tag with the same name as the Task List so we can easily identify it on the Board View.

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

IMPORTANT: Automatically add the task to the “In Progress” board column.  If you do not select a board column during task creation, when you toggle to that view it wonʼt appear… thatʼs no fun.

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

And that is everything we add.

Here is what the confirmation screen should look like. Go ahead and “Add Task List”.

Using Teamwork Projects to Automate Your Content Review

Step  5. Take a second to appreciate what youʼve created, and get to work!

Here’s a quick video walkthrough of what exactly weʼve created. To begin using this system you begin in the “Task List” view and click “Add a Task”.

Take note of the default task settings youʼve put into place: Assignee, Description, Tag, and Board.

Then as you “Save Changes” hurry on over to Board View to see a new card under the “In Progress” column.  To test it out, move the card along to each and every column and watch the triggers behind each work almost instantly.

What is the impact?

Before we had this system, we had our content creator sending messages in random chat threads as URLs and screenshots. And by the time Iʼd come around to review it, Iʼd have to scroll through a sea of messages… or maybe I forgot to get to it or didnʼt notice and they would have to ping me again.

Since most of these posts theyʼd send were a screenshot of a draft Facebook post, if I ever wanted to go back and search for the post I couldnʼt… because there were no tags or descriptions to search by.

At best, because of this frustrating non-system, we were posting one to two times a week… no themes, no true editorial process, and no organized board or task view for our managers to refer to. We were better off with no system.

I didnʼt even scratch the surface of what else we integrate this board view into with the rest of Teamwork, Zapier, and Facebook. Since we now have a centralized content creation and editorial hub, we are able to automate more and more.

For us, we donʼt need any fancy or spendy software to manage our social media, we already had the tool to quickly piece it together in a way that is flexible to how we already work.

Youʼve made it this far.

If you are reading this, then surely you are interested in creating this same exact system for yourself. If you are not a user of Teamwork Projects and you made it down here, then my guess is youʼre ready to make the change.

Regardless of what boat you are in, I am happy to have shared with you a bit of the automation magic we create here at Automated Dreams to help business owners have the time and energy to work more on their business and spend less time working inside of it.

If you take a crack at creating this system and would like someone to go over it, or perhaps you want a quick evaluation of your current project management setup in general,  Iʼd like to extend our free 30-Minute Dream Team call to you. Contact us today!
Schedule One Here

Share Insight:

You may also like

Streamline your processes and place your customers at the core

Want to scale your business on a budget?

Join me on a FREE call

We'll discuss your concerns, goals, and how automation and process management can help you scale quickly.