Community Blogs

It’s that time of year for many schools and universities: Summer Projects Time! It’s that most wonderful time of the year the staff scrambles to knock out what they can, while they can, while students and staff are out of the building or are in the buildings at limited capacities. So how do you coordinate the activities? How do you track completions or costs? What can SchoolDude applications do to help? 

Some time back, we performed a webinar in association with Facility Masters on the topic of “Tackling Summer Maintenance and Capital Projects”, so let’s revisit some key elements:

• Project is a drop-down box in many SchoolDude applications that can be used to associate records against either a generic “Summer Project” or specific summer projects. You can create a Project name that will appear in a dropdown box on forms in MaintenanceDirect, ITDirect, InventoryDirect, PlanningDirect and PMDirect. Simply create it in one application and you’ll have the option to use it in others! 
• When work or service requests are submitted, the person reviewing the request has the option of identifying if that request may be a part of a summer project and updating the status to an option such as “Pending” or “On Hold” or “Deferred” or a similar status that indicates “we’re not saying no, we’re just not ready yet.” 
• Target Start Date vs. Target Completion Date vs. Actual Completion Date allows MaintenanceDirect and ITDirect users the options of coordinating the start and completion of work that could be associated against a Project. Several reports allow you to search and filter for any of those date types in conjunction with searching by statuses, locations or types of work. 
• Saved Searches enables users to set up a “save your favorite search” style of report and the ability to have those reports automatically emailed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. PMDirect permits administrators to set up schedules on a yearly basis for those projects that are expected to start every year during the summer months, plus the user can decide any details such as what project vs. trade vs. task list vs. # of days to complete, etc. that can auto-fill the resulting work orders. 

For screenshots and sample reports, check out the attached section of the presentation used from Facility Masters’ "Tackling Summer Maintenance and Capital Projects".