Creating New Projects

Creating New Projects

We know two things to be true:
  1. Every project needs a workflow
  2. A workflow contains at least one stage, which contains substages 

Creating a New Project

Please note this video does not have audio


Creating a new project involves:
  1. Selecting an appropriate workflow
  2. Designating an owner for the project
    1. An admin may also designate you as the owner of a project which will appear on your project dashboard.
  3. Inputting inclusion criteria
  4. Adding other team members to the project
    1. This can be done afterwards via "Edit Solicitation Details".
As procurement staff you can create new projects using workflows that have been created by a team administrator. Once created, you can view, edit, delete any of the objects within that project. 

Project Layout

Once you create a solicitation, you can open the solicitation to its dashboard or home page. All solicitation home pages have 8 boxes of objects:
  1. Solicitation Details
  2. Documents
  3. Key Staff Role Titles
  4. Header and Footer Templates
  5. Question Responses
  6. Solicitation Tasks
  7. Exports
  8. Messages
You can navigate to these panes by using the menu on the left, or scrolling the webpage.


After you create your solicitaiton, a great place to start is by answering questions. Because questions include/exclude documents and language, answering questions upfront will help you collect all the conditional documents you might need for your project.

Answering Questions

Depending on the project stages selected, you may be presented with a series of additional questions to help Solicitation Builder assemble the correct document templates and pre-populate them with key information. 

While some questions require an answer to continue, others will let you skip to the next question, or assign the question to another user.  To answer a question later, select “Skip for Now” or “Don’t Know?” to assign the question to another team member within your project. 



Action Center

The action center can be found when using the solicitation builder project stage. The Action Center is a list of clickable links and buttons. Let's discuss their functions below:
  1. Export Solicitation PDF - for more information, click here.
  2. Edit Solicitation Details - for more information, click here.
  3. Track changes for everyone - for more information,  click here.
  4. Save Current Version - more info below
  5. Run Accessibility Check - for more information, click here.
  6. Create summary of changes - for more information,  click here.
  7. Change Solicitation Status - more info below
Save Current Version

Save Current Version is a feature that saves the current versions of your documents, so you can access and restore this information at a later time. Solicitation Builder automatically saves versions of all solicitation sections in four scenarios:

  1. When you create a solicitation

  2. When you export the solicitation

  3. When you click "Save Current Version" in the Action Center

  4. When you click "Add New Version" from inside a section

Users with permissions to edit a section can save the version of that section.

Admins/Owners/Editors can click "Save Current Version" in the Action Center to save all versions of all sections in one bulk action. To access and restore saved versions, users can go to a section and click on 'Version History'.

Status

Status is a way to communicate the various project stages. There are six status you can choose from: 

  • In Progress, Published, Addendum, Contracting, Completed, Archived

When a new project is created, the status will always be set to 'In Progress'. After a contract is signed with a bidder/vendor, the status can be changed to 'Completed'. The other status represent the milestones between 'In Progress' and 'Completed'.

 

If a solicitation Status is In Progress, any updates made to templates on the Configuration page will appear in live solicitations the next time an update is triggered from editing the Details or answering a question. If a solicitation is any other Status, any updates to templates on the Configuration page will not be pulled-in to a solicitation.

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