The 5-Step Guide to Successfully Managing Tasks within Pilera

A successful community relies heavily on the communication between board members and the community managers that carry out operations on their behalf.  Managers and board members work together to solicit vendor bids, draft budgets and reserves, and handle owner correspondences. With so many tasks to work on, they need an easy way to organize them and be able to reference them in the future.  Pilera’s board task management, now part of HOA+, empowers managers and board members to work together on community action items from initiation to completion.  In this article, we’ll cover five critical steps to take to ensure a successful implementation of task management.

Delegate roles

The first step to leveraging the board task management functionality is ensuring that managers and board members are designated the proper roles.  Company Admins and Community Managers will already be able to create and manage tasks. If any staff or board members are designated as a “Community Admin”, they will need to be assigned the “Task Admin” for any communities they will be handling tasks for. 
Where to find it: Settings → User Roles Administration

Create custom categories

Custom categories for the task management module refer to the types of tasks and its sub-tasks that managers and board members will work on in the communities they manage.  Creating these custom categories will help managers and board members to keep track of the type of tasks they work on and generate reports. Once you’ve created the categories and subcategories, you’ll then apply them to the communities that require them.  Take a look at some examples of custom categories you can create:

Where to find it: Settings → Templates → Task

Start creating your tasks and set a due date

Now, you’re ready to create tasks.  Tasks can be created out of action items that need to be taken care of, during or after a board or internal company meeting.  Managers and board members will have the option to add a detailed description, assign the ticket, set a due date, notify other board members/managers, and upload attachments.  Furthermore, managers will be able to set board member permissions on tickets they create.
Where to find this: Tickets → Task Management 

Keep your stakeholders in the loop

As each task progresses, you’ll want to keep other managers and board members in the loop.  You can reassign the task, update the status, and add a comment. Let’s say that you’re working on getting vendor quotes and you want to know how much the community paid for landscaping services.  Simply reassign the task to the manager or board member to get this information, ask your question in the comments, and have them assign the task back to you with their answer. Once the task is finished, simply change the status to “Complete”.  Pilera’s ticketing system tracks each action that is taken to a ticket to provide managers and board members with an audit trail.

Where to find this: Click on the “i” icon and click “Add Comment/Change Status/Assign”.

Master the dashboard and generate reports

Managers and board members can gain high-level or bird’s-eye view into the tasks that are being worked on for a community.  The dashboard provides powerful filtering capabilities based on varied business needs. Criteria that managers and board members can select from include community, status, custom category and subcategory, and date range.  Managers and board members can then generate reports and take them offline for a meeting or further analysis.  Take a look at these four use case scenarios that you can model for your own communities:

1. All tasks that have been completed by a specific manager or board member in the past year.
2. All the open tasks assigned to a manager or board member.  This is a great view for the assignee to see as they start work for the day. 
3. All tasks that have been created with the category Budgeting to review at the next board meeting.
4. A company admin can view a list of all open tasks assigned to managers across the entire portfolio. 

Pilera’s board task management module aims to bring more accountability and transparency into community tasks through the ability to set due dates and view a comprehensive audit trail of each action taken on a task.  In a successful implementation, managers and board members can manage each stage of the task while keeping important stakeholders informed and gaining business insights.

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About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management suite that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. May we help your community achieve these success stories? Book a demo to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.