Drum's Task Types (and how to use them)

Drum supports three distinct task types:

Being able to leverage these three different task types will allow you to set up your projects in a way that ensures fantastic quality control and allows you to leverage all of the different features within your Drum account.

In this article we'll briefly explain what each task type does and how you can use it to get the most out of your Drum subscription.

Standard tasks are the workhorse tasks within your Drum account. They can contain budget, which will be used to determine your deliverable and parent project budgets.

They allow assignment and currently have a due date (with a start date and additional enhancements for resourcing coming soon!).

In the future, these tasks will also be scheduled on a new Drum resource planner.

These tasks can have time allocated to them on the timesheet and in the live timer in the navigation bar.

Event tasks differ from standard tasks in that they are a specific block of time that can be booked on your calendar.

Think about scenarios like site visits, client meetings, or if your firm likes to block out very specific blocks of time to assign work to staff, the event concept could be a great fit for you.

These tasks can still have time allocated to them and behave very similar to standard tasks with the exception that they can be blocked out on the calendar.

Process-only tasks are tasks that do not contain any budget. Time cannot be allocated to these tasks either.

The value of a process-only task is a to-do item or a checkbox to say that a key task within a project has been done, but you don't necessarily want that task to contain budget or to be considered generally from a financial perspective.

Great use cases for process-only tasks are items like ensuring that invoices have been sent or paid, ensuring that documentation has been received or sent, or the key steps that are required within your firm to close out any single project.

On the project page in Drum, when you click on the plus icon below a deliverable block, that will add a process-only task by default.

In the settings area of Drum, there is an option called deliverable templates. This allows you to create individual deliverable templates that you can use on your opportunities or projects in Drum and assign a predefined list of tasks for each of those deliverables.

The benefit of creating a deliverable once and then assigning it to multiple project templates in your Drum account is that it saves you from having to repeat yourself over and over and also makes it much easier to manage when a change needs to be made in the future.

From the deliverable template page, click on one of the deliverable templates or create a new deliverable template. When looking at the new deliverable template page, you can add all of the different task types that you would like to that template.

When adding a task, you can choose the task type:

On your projects, provided that you have the correct permissions, you can click on the plus icon in the header row of a deliverable to add a new process-only task to the deliverable list.

The reason that Drum sets a process-only task type by default is that generally speaking, we don't want to add a new task that includes budget in an impromptu way to a project.

These should instead be managed via the original budget feature or via a variation attached to that project.

You can always adjust the task type once you've added the task by clicking on the three vertical dots to the very right of the task row and adjusting the task type with the drop-down options.

The other way to manage tasks on a project is via the original budget feature. To navigate to the original budget of a project, first click on the budget tab on the project page and then click on the original budget button to the top right of that budget page.

There you can add new deliverables and new tasks and you have the ability to change the task type for each of your tasks with the drop down option in each task row.

There are two key ways to book an event task to your calendar in Drum. You can do it on the planner view of the calendar where you can drag and drop many different tasks across all of your different projects onto the work planner.

Otherwise, you can do it on a project by project basis by clicking on the due date area of the event task, allocating who should be allocated to that event, and then it will show you those concepts on the calendar.

If you would like to bulk plan your future events in your Drum account, or you simply prefer a visual UI for allocating events, you can use the Planner view of Drum's calendar.

To access the Planner, click on the calendar option in the top navigation bar, and then click on the toggle Planner mode option to the top right hand corner. The view that appears will show a sidebar with all unbooked events appearing in that sidebar and filters for you to adjust what events should be shown there.

For each of these events, you can simply drag and drop those events onto the individuals that should be assigned, and then confirm the booking in the confirmation window that appears once you've dropped that event.

For the tasks that are events on a project, we will see a calendar icon to the left of the task name.

And once we assign individuals to that event task, when we click on the due date field on that task row, it will open up a unique modal window where we can add additional information about that event booking.

Once one or more individuals are booked in this way, you will see that time blocked out on the calendar in your drum account.

Alternatively, if you have multiple events to book for a project, or you'd like a more visual UI for this process, you can click on the "Plan Events" link above the deliverable list on your project view to be taken to a planner view of the calendar where you can drag and drop the outstanding events from the left-hand menu onto the calendar for the staff that you'd like to book.

Once you've dragged and dropped one of these events from the left hand sidebar onto the calendar for the individual that you'd like to book, you'll see a confirmation window for that event booking where you can simply click save to confirm.

It's important to remember that these different task types in Drum are simply there to support your internal processes.

If you don't have a good use case to use a process only or an event task, simply don't use them and potentially keep them in your pocket for use in the future.

They are simply different ways of managing the different requirements that our customers want to manage within their accounts.

If you're ever unsure on how you should be templating your projects or how you should be managing your projects in Drum, please reach out to our team and we will be more than happy to help.