I am a freelance Events Project Manager based in London. I work for several clients - though generally only 2 or 3 at a time. My projects are very varied - they can be in a field, exhibition hall, conference centre or a museum.
I work for myself and use Google for my email etc. I own my own domain (flair.london and flair.ltd.uk) and am happy tinkering with DNS etc (I use GoDaddy for DNS)
The problem
The way schedules are written and distributed on the projects I work on I think is a mess. More often than not they are in Excel or Google Sheets and are difficult to read / manage. Accommodation requirements, trucking schedules, delivery schedules etc are all maintained separately and I have always thought this info should come from one single source of truth. All suppliers / contractors are sent the same document and expected to wade through 200 + lines of an excel sheet to find the bits relevant to them. Yes they can filter against their own name, but that’s not always obvious and depends on how the spreadsheet it set up.
The fix (I think)
Keep a centralised database, accessible to all which has all the info in one place in an easy to access manor. PDF reports can be generated and emailed to people and / or link website links shared.
Create a website which pulls live data from Airtable. Ideally hosted on my domain (flair.london). For example projects.flair.london or {project_name}.flair.london Users are sent a single link which allows access to their projects. One user would generally only need access to one project.
The important thing for now at least is just to give them read only access. Edit access is less important as I would maintain the schedule. (though it would be nice if they could comment?)
The Website
The website would need to be clean, snappy and work on mobile and desktop (so that people can access it whilst working on site or from the office. Table format, grouped by date essential (Glide Pages does not seem to support grouping?). A calendar view would be a nice on the desktop version. I use the Airtable calendar view a lot at the moment.
User roles
Should be quite simple. I would be the only one with access to the Airtable base - where all the updates / work is done. The only other type of user would have read only access to specific projects I assign to them. It would be unlikely another person would need to access more than one project.
Pages on the site
Full schedule. Grouped by and sorted by date. Then sorted by time within each group. A filter so that it can be filtered by supplier. Search bar
Would be nice to have old entries greyed out (or hidden as an option) so you only see relevant stuff.
Option to generate or link to a PDF (which some people prefer). I have cracked this already using Documint. Examples here :
What I have done so far (Less important to read - info only)
I have got quite far, but there is still a way to go.
Airtable base (this can change / be adapted if needed)
This is working really well. I have the following tables :
Main schedule - each entry is entered in here. I have set up several views which I use for different things. For example -
A main schedule - which is shared as a read only link with various people and grouped by date
A trucking schedule so I can see which trucks are collecting from where. Each truck is given a code (KN1, KN2 etc) This view is filtered against the trucking supplier”Kuene and Nagel” and grouped on truck reference number
A delivery schedule - filtered against “Type” = “Delivery to NML”. (NML is the venue)
etc
Dates Lookup - this is a list of days we are working on site. Dates we work on site are always fixed so I know when we start, and when we finish. So creating this table is not too onerous. If I needed to make lots of these tables, I would set up an automation.
Reasons I have this table are :
I absolutely need to show days as Wednesday 3rd May for example. The date field in Airtable only allows at best 3rd May. So I have a formula field to concatenate the date into something more friendly. Problem with that is it then only sorts alphabetically - not chronologically. So this table creates a “Friendly date” field with the numeric date (2022-05-03) at the beginning, followed by the nice date (Friday 3rd May). I then add a little bit of Extra info which is useful (for example Week 1 of 4). Clunky huh?!
This table is also referenced by the daily reports table
Version - this stores each version - so Previously issued schedules, current issue schedule and current draft (which is a version I am working on before sending to suppliers). Documint can only create a PDF from one record - so I need this table (which links back to the main schedule) so that Documint can pull in all the relevant entires. There is an automation or two on this table which “issues” a schedule (ie - Makes the current draft, the current issue, changes the old current issue to previous issue etc - all with the date added)
Suppliers - with addresses.
Accommodation table - a record for each person coming to site, along with dates they need accommodaiton. In the main schedule table, I have a field which links to this table so I manually add who needs accommodation which day.
Truck list table - this is the master list of trucks. If we need to add a new truck, I add a row, give it a name - then link to it from the master schedule
Daily updates table - I have created a mechanism for people to enter relevant daily updates using this form. These are linked back to the Dates Lookup table. I then generate a report in Page Designer so that my client can see how things are progressing.
One of the problems with this, is that I am constantly sending different links to people with different views. I expect they are fed up with receiving “another link” from Andrew. Ideally, I would send one link to the website - then they can choose what they need from there!
One other thing I like to do is highlight / identify what has changed and when. So I have a column with an automation which adds “Updated” or “New” as relevant - along with the date - so people can see what changed when. It would be lovely to be able to highlight a record too.
Once I have this working, I would like to bring other things into the website. For example :
Edit access - as mentioned, the most use scenario is for read only access to the schedule. I am happy working with the data and updating it in Airtable (though will set up an Airtable interface at some point). Less of a priority would be to give people write access so they can update and add entries themselves. Comments would be very useful though.
Budget - I currently send two or three different links to Airtable bases to our Financial Director. Probably not worth setting something up in Glide - but it would be good to at least have the links in one place This of course would have to have access restrictions
Risk Register - very simple list of issues.
Object list - this is specific to the project I am working on now - so again, may not be worth investing the time in setting it up in Glide - but worth having the links collated in one area.
What would I like to get from V88
I’ve spent so much time fiddling about with different systems and have not got anywhere. I’ve tried Softr, Stacker, On2Air, Pory.io amongst others. It could be that one of those would be perfect for me - but without investing time / money I do not know for sure. I don’t want to risk spending another several hours setting something up with Glide, only to find I can’t get it to do what I need. So I would like to be sure that Glide do what I need before going too much further.
If you feel it can, I would love for you to put me on the right track. I am happy to put the leg work in, but will need a push in the right direction. We’ve agreed 3 hours consultation for this already. Hopefully that’s enough to get me going, but I can see myself needing more help once I get into it.
Costs
I’m happy to invest my time and to pay for your time. I
We’ve agreed 3 hours and I’d be happy to pay for a few more as we get going.
I have to be conscious of what the whole thing comes to though and need to consider the subscription costs. Already paying for Airtable and Make (set up an automation last night to download attachments from Airtable and upload to Dropbox. Thanks for the tip!) and you mentioned the $99 option for Glide which worries me slightly.
I won’t be able to charge this back to my clients so I need to be mindful.
That said - it is something I am keen to do and have a personal interest and enthusiasm in developing.
