Solar EPC Project Management: Plan and delegate activities

After you have created a solar installation project, you can proceed to list all your important project activities in the Task List spreadsheet.

There, you can set the planned schedule and scope of work (SOW) for those activities. Then delegate to the members of your project team.

Create a project plan / schedule

When you go to the project dashboard, you will find the scope of work (SOW) for that specific project listed in the Task List spreadsheet in the left hand menu of your project dashboard.

When you click on the Task List link, it will open a Google Spreadsheet with all your project activities (or project SOW) listed. The Task List sheet will have some default project activities which are imported from the default solar project template, whenever a new project is created in Fuzen.

You can directly edit the spreadsheet to change the project SOW.

You can also access the same Task List sheet by clicking the link at the top of the ‘Progress Tracking’ section of your project dashboard.

It will open the Task List sheet in a new pop-up window, where you can make the required changes.

You can edit these project activities, their WBS numbers, priorities etc. It is even possible to customize the format of this task list sheet by adding new columns. You can also directly connect with our support team and they will help you customize the Task List sheet as per your own project template.

To set up the planned schedule date, you can enter the details in either two of the – Duration, Planned Start or Planned Date columns. If you enter duration and planned start date, then planned end date will be automatically determined.

The actual start and end dates will be determined based on the progress updates actually sent by your project team, once the work commences.

If you have already scheduled your project in MS Project or Primavera, you can export that schedule to a CSV file. Then copy the project activities from CSV and paste them to the Task List spreadsheet, to easily import your project schedule to Fuzen.

Define project scope of work (SOW)

But before commencing with the project work, you will first need to define the planned scope of work or SOW for each activity.

You can do this by entering the appropriate amount of work to be done in the ‘Planned SOW’ column and then select the correct unit to measure the work.

If you are unsure about the unit to be used just enter the planned SOW as 100% – so enter 100 in the planned SOW column and select ‘%’ as the unit. For example, certain documentation or site survey activities will need to be measured in terms of their % completion.

The ‘Actual SOW’ and ‘% Progress’ columns are updated automatically based on the actual work done reported by your project team via the ‘Progress Update Form’.

Delegate the project activities

Once you have defined the timelines and SOW for all the activities, you can delegate the individual project activities to members of your project team.

For delegating a single task at a time, you can simply go to the progress tracking section of project dashboard and then click on the task / activity that you want to delegate.

You will be taken to the task details page for the selected task. Once there, go to the ‘Collaborate’ section and then select a task owner to delegate this task to the selected user.

If you want multiple people to collaborate on the same activities, you can select more users from the ‘Collaborators’ dropdown. All the selected people will be able to update the selected task details.

Furthermore, you can also add ‘External Collaborators’ to any task. These external collaborators will typically be people outside of your organization who don’t have access to your Fuzen project dashboard. But they will still be able to contribute their inputs for the selected activity.

For example, when you work with subcontractors on a particular activity, you can add the subcontractor’s email as external collaborator. Fuzen will send them an email with links to Google Forms where they can contribute their inputs or progress updates about they work they have done.

Delegate tasks in bulk

Instead of going from task to task, you can also delegate many tasks in bulk by going directly to the Task List spreadsheet.

There, you can select the owner for each activity by going to the ‘Task Owner’ column. Then you can simply drag a cell across the column to bulk assign all selected tasks to a single user.

Once all the project activities are delegated, Fuzen’s automation workflows will start working. Fuzen will send daily email reminders to your project team regarding the work that is assigned to them and is due on that day.

They will then use the ‘Progress Update Form’ linked in the daily emails to send progress updates about actual work done – on site, in office, documentation, contractual work etc.