Assigning Staff to Tasks

By the time you've come to assign staff to production roles, you've already configured your templates, tasks and costs. You've also already added the relevant project from your Title Management system to the Production Schedule (or from Editorial).

You are ready to start manipulating the information within the schedule itself.

Please note - how your organisation chooses to manage the maintenance of this data is up to you. You may have one production controller controlling all of this information, or you may have individual members of staff updating the system at any given time. Just ensure consistency in the processes you decide to put into place.

Items in the Production Deadlines tab, the first one in the image below that is not circled, are those elements of the schedule that are not assigned to any person but that have to happen before the production schedule can begin.

The Production Roles tab (first red circle below) are all of the individual items that make up a project's production schedule. The schedules that you will be applying to your books will undoubtedly be different to the one we have created as an example, but this will at least give you an idea of a starting point. 

In the second red circle above, you'll see a field where you can assign particular members of staff to the tasks that make up the schedule. The names will have been populated into this list by setting up production staff.

Choose the relevant member of staff from each drop-down menu that appears within each production task. The allocated person can then go back into this screen to add their data throughout the process of production, inputting dates and confirming tasks are completed. This is important as it will help with future reporting in terms of how your production schedules are working and how they may be improved. Also, if you do assign a person to a task, that information will be available to them on their Stison system's dashboard. This will ensure that if any dates are impending, the appropriate colleague will receive a notice on their dashboard to update the system.

ALWAYS remember to hit the blue Update button at the bottom in order to ensure the information is saved.

Once you have allocated members of staff to tasks, and you have begun to add data including dates started, you are probably ready to start inputting the details of the print run, what we call Adding the Print Run Data.