Prism Project Details

Prism Projects offers a rich variety of features for creating and assigning various task types, including Work Orders, Bids, and project-specific tasks. Here, you can quickly manage deadlines, priorities, designate project admins and leaders and assign tasks to others. What’s more, it offers a new Prism feature for adding up to 25 followers for any given project, who will get notifications on all major project updates (as configured in the Admin section).

Adding Project Details

Figure 6: The Project Details edit screen where the details of a new project are entered.

The project details available to you include:

• Project Name: providing a short but descriptive name for each project is recommended, however, duplicate names are permitted. Each project will receive a unique identifier upon saving with the “Create Project” button
• Start & End Date: These are the main project bounding dates. They are editable at any time in the project with changes logged in the history of the project.
• Priority: users may choose from four different priorities to help define the order of project completion or urgency.
• Project Administrator: the project administrator is typically considered the ranking project manager for a group of projects that may span an entire portfolio or property group. These are typically given full rights to edit, view, create, and manage all projects. Project Admins may be selected from any user in the “My Users” module of Prism.
• Project Lead: usually assigned at a property or regional level, adding a Project Leads is optional. Leads may also be selected from any user in the “My Users” module of Prism.
• Project Categories: Project Managers can associate categories with their projects for improved financial tracking, accurate reporting, and better organization. Prism Projects comes with six default categories. Although these may be renamed at the Account level, categories may not be added or deleted. The default categories are:
  1. Development: typically used for projects related to creating or building something new, often in the context of new construction.
  2. Exchange: this category involves replacing or swapping out existing systems, upgrades, or moving from one platform to another. Examples include upgrading an HVAC system or a chiller plant.
  3. Improvements: These focus on enhancing assets and may include renovations or updates to a facility to, e.g., improve its aesthetics and thereby enhance its value.
  4. Other: catch-all category used for ad hoc or miscellaneous projects.
  5. Profitable Alterations: projects in this category are typically aimed at making changes that will directly generate revenue or increase profitability.
  6. Tenant Improvements: In real estate, these usually refer to modifications made to a leased space to accommodate the needs of its occupants. Usually, they are agreed upon in the lease and may be funded by the landlord, tenant, or shared between parties and therefore require a high degree of budgetary accountability.
• Finance ID: an optional field, this is usually used to tie the project into accounting systems such as MRI or Yardi and may be provided in advance to Project Administrators or leads when creating the project.
• Status: Projects have to basic statuses, “Open” and “Closed.” To provide better project performance tracking, these will be enhanced in late 2024 to include the additional statuses of “Completed”, “Cancelled” and “Not Started.”
• Budgeting:
  • Currency: Projects uses Prism’s built-in currency handling functions to track projects in virtually any country world-wide. Note that a project may only have one currency at a time and will be restricted by the geographic location of the Property (or properties) selected for the Project.
  • Approved Budget: The initial budget established for a project, this value, once saved, cannot be edited. It is most often (though not always) provided by an accounting department or Project administrator who tracks company costs closely. The Approved Budget field is also used to track variance against the “Total Cost to Date” and/or the “Revised Budget” when it is present.
  • Revised Budget: because the user cannot edit an approved budget, a revised budget provides a method to update a budget while also providing better accountability and improved accuracy in forecasting. Once saved to the Project, it is tracked against the Approved Budget, while Total Cost to Date is tracked by that epic instead.
• Project Tags: Add searchable tags to projects for custom categorization and easy filtering. Any project user with edit rights may create a tag and add it to a project. However, tags cannot, however, be removed once saved.
• Project Overview: an optional field used for any text descriptor the users want to add.
• Sustainability Project: This toggle indicates whether the project relates to Sustainability.
• Properties: covered in detail elsewhere in the Prism documentation, property selection is performed using the toggles under the “Properties” heading to assign individual properties to the property. Property groups may also be assigned to Projects to facilitate project execution that spans regional or divisional groupings.

Once all high-level details of the project have been entered, select “Create Project” to save the project and return to the Projects dashboard. The “Cancel” button will delete all data entered and return the user to the Project Dashboard without saving the project.

 

Project Details Features

More features of the Project Details include the ability to add and edit the properties in your project, add files to your project, view the history of changes, make comments, and add followers who will receive notification of project changes.

Properties Tab of the Project Details

The property name and address of the properties in the scope of the project are found by navigating to the “Properties” tab of the project

Figure 7: Properties in the scope of a project may be found in the Properties tab of the project details

Files Tab of the Project Details

Any file type supported by Prism including contracts, documents, spreadsheets, images, and certificates may be added to your project.

1. Navigate to the Project Details page and select the “Files” tab

Figure 8: Adding files to a project in the details page.

1. Select the “+ Add File” button, files may be uploaded directly from the users device, hyperlinks created, or files may be selected from Prism’s “My Files” module, which supports searching and detailed classification by file types and property.

Figure 9: Uploading files from Prism's "My Files" module allows for searching, tagging, and detailed categorization.