How to Set Up Your Team for Success in Punchlist

Trying to dig up Slack threads, endless email chains, or client meeting notes can seriously ruin your productivity as a project manager. Not to mention, this causes delays for your whole team. The old process of wrangling feedback can easily lead to missing a critical change in your next deliverable.

How can you simplify the process? Your team needs a better way to both receive and share feedback, internally and externally. That’s why you found Punchlist.

With Punchlist, you can easily share a link to a project, and your stakeholders can leave comments and references on top of the work itself. This “digital paper trail” is accessible to everyone in the project, so that they can knock those revisions out of the park.

Now that you’ve begun your Punchlist journey to create a hub for all feedback, we’ll show you how you can streamline your entire project management process.

The best way? Start by adding the right people to your Workspace, and give them the right roles. This will not only clear up the missed threads, but also help your team work together better to hit milestones in record time.

First, Let’s Set Up Your Workspace

First, set up your Punchlist Workspace, which is a fancy word for your organization’s account. This is your team’s custom area to consolidate all feedback, organize projects into folders, and gain visibility into everything that’s happening on your projects so you can run a tight ship.
Add your company’s logo and name under Team Settings. All of your projects will live under this Workspace. Make it your own!

Who Should You Invite to Punchlist?

• Designate the Workspace Manager (by default this will be the person who first set up the Punchlist Workspace – likely you!).
• Add 2+ internal Team Members to your Workspace.
• Once you’ve got a Project set up and ready for review, share it with collaborators (Guests) which may be your client, vendor or a stakeholder from a different team.

Pro Tip: Guests will only be able to view and leave feedback on the Project they’re invited to, and won’t be able to make changes to your Workspace nor see other Projects.

→ Learn more about the differences between Manager, Team Member and Collaborator/Guest in Punchlist.

At this stage, prioritize the project manager (Manager) and then your internal coworkers (Team Members) with upcoming feedback needs. This step will help you streamline your project management process and distinguish between internal and external stakeholders. Anyone you designate as “Team Member” will become part of your official Team Workspace.

Next, Add Your Team

Your Punchlist account provides you with up to 50 team member seats when you join.

You can also add unlimited guests — think of these as external stakeholders like your clients or other departments. (We’ll talk more about guests later in this post.)

When adding people to your Workspace, we recommend starting with your internal team members that will be creating projects and need feedback.

You can invite more people anytime to your Workspace by clicking the Team button in the top left of your Dashboard.

• You can share an invite manually by copying and pasting the Share link in any communication platform (email, Slack, Jira etc.).
• This link will automatically add anyone who clicks on it to your Workspace — so be mindful of where you share it. If you ever need to generate a new URL for adding people to your Workspace, you can do that with one click. Doing so will invalidate the previous URL, but will not remove people who have previously joined your Workspace.
• Or you can invite users automatically — type in their email and our system will invite them. All they have to do is click accept.

It’s best practice to get your Workspace set up and Team Members invited before you’re ready to share that first Project for feedback.

Make Feedback Actionable

A great benefit of adding five or more team members to your Workspace is the ability to tag teammates with @Mentions, and Assign feedback items as actionable tasks. You’ll notice that it’s easier to @Mention or Assign someone when they’re a Team Member in your Workspace. Their name will automatically appear in the dropdown, even if you haven’t added them to a particular Project yet. Saves you a step!

Control Who Sees What

Another benefit of designating your Team Members is that you can quickly give them visibility into what’s happening across your different Projects, without having to “over communicate” in other tools.

For example, when sharing a Project for feedback, you can set it to Workspace Only with one click. This allows your official Team Members to access this new Project right away, if they’re already in your Workspace.
You can learn more about the three options for project access here.

Create a Feedback Hierarchy

I know, this sounds like a lot of different roles… but hear us out. There’s a method to the madness, especially for larger agencies and enterprise teams.

Not all feedback has the same weight. And not all stakeholders should be able to change all your settings, or view everything that’s happening. You’ll want to keep certain people focused on ONLY reviewing and giving feedback on the project at hand.

This is where Collaborators (Guests) come into play.

Invite Guests to a Project

Collaborators or Guests may be your client if you’re an agency or firm. Or maybe they are stakeholders from other departments, and you only want them to weigh in on a specific Project.

To invite guests, click the Share link in the top right of the Project screen. Again, you can invite by sending a URL or adding their email address. This Share URL is Project specific — anyone with the link will have access to your project.
You can send the share link to these folks and they can quickly jump in to review the Project and give feedback, without even creating a Punchlist account.

(Full disclosure, we do ask new Guests for their name and email address. But that’s it. We don’t market to your invited guests, and you can invite as many Guests as you’d like.)

Invited guests can easily provide feedback by adding written or recorded feedback, attach files, and leave comments exactly where they need to. In a nutshell, they have all the feedback features for leaving pinpointed comments on that one Project, but they have none of the organizational features of your Workspace (these are reserved for the Manager and official Team Members).

Now That You’ve Added Your Team, What’s Next?

Upload your next Project, and invite the appropriate stakeholders for their comments. Send off the share link and see all the feedback consolidated in one spot, without you needing to follow up. You can even set a due date for feedback, and Punchlist will send friendly reminders 3 days and 1 day before feedback is due. Happy commenting!

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