This post originally appeared here.

Your project may contain tasks that depend on each other. Sometimes a task cannot start until its dependent (predecessor) task finishes, or maybe the task can start when its dependent task starts as well. As you manage tasks with these more complex dependency types (FS, SF, SS, FF), you may find more specialized software or SaaS tool to help you plan and visualize these tasks.

Goal of this post

This post doesn’t show the pros and cons of each platform, nor does it pick a “winner” that can handle this use case perfectly. Every team and project manager has their own unique use case and “jobs to be done.” …

Once your Jira backlog of issues grows to a certain point, you may want to view all your issues in another format like a spreadsheet to figure out what your team should focus on. In a spreadsheet, you can quickly filter, sort, and organize issues by multiple dimensions like priority, due date, and status. The issue is that the spreadsheet is only a snapshot of your Jira issues. As your team makes updates in Jira, those updates to sync to your spreadsheet unless you use an add-on like Jira Cloud for Sheets. …

A hospitality veteran

For August 2020’s virtual NYC meetup, I had a chance to speak with Kevin Levine, Associate Director of Colleague Relations for New York City at Hyatt Hotels.

Kevin joined Hyatt 16 years ago and started in an operations role supporting Hyatt Hotels in Rhode Island supporting housekeeping operations. He eventually made his way to New York and calls the Grand Hyatt NYC his home base. Kevin needs to stay in contact with his distributed staff across the five hotels: Andaz 5th Avenue, Andaz Wall Street, Grant Hyatt New York, Hyatt Centric Times Square, and Park Hyatt New York.

Kevin discussed how his role has evolved with COVID-19 as his hotels suspended operations at the start of the pandemic and remain suspended (as of August 2020). Prior to the pandemic, his hotels were hiring a lot and he used Coda to track the hiring process his team’s SOPs (standard operating procedures). The hiring process is very unique since Kevin has to abide by many rules imposed by the city, state, and hotel unions. As the pandemic unfolded, his use case for Coda shifted to tracking which hotel staff he’s reaching out to (he calls them “care calls”), storing nuances about union contracts, and more. …

If your organization creates multiple Google Docs every day and you want a better way to sort, filter, and organize all these Google Docs, this solution may be useful for you. This tutorial walks you through how to extract the important metadata from a table in a Google Doc and sync that data into a table in Coda.

I often see templates for project briefs, meeting notes, or candidate interview as Google Docs at other organizations which are duplicated over and over again. These Google Docs are then stored in Google Drive which can get very unwieldy to manage unless someone is consistently organizing the folders in Google Drive. …

This post is also a published doc, which you can explore here.

For July 2020’s virtual NYC meetup, I had a chance to speak with Ariana Cofone, VP of Operations at Decoded. Ariana found her way into technology (full-stack web development) after careers in the arts and operations. She dubs herself as a “creative technologist” and enjoys building tools that solve real problems.

As the VP of Operations at Decoded, a technology education company, she oversees many processes from coordinating technologists to facilitate workshops to helping the client team improve their processes. …

See the original post and template here. This post was originally written by Rachel Williams at MasterClass.

MasterClass allows anyone to learn from the best in the world. Step into Anna Wintour’s office, Timbaland’s recording studio, and Neil Gaiman’s writing retreat. Improve your serve with Serena Williams, perfect your pitch with Shonda Rhimes, and leave the atmosphere with Chris Hadfield. Launching new classes impacts all aspects of the business and every team is involved in some shape or form.

In 2018, a small team was created to investigate the “state of class launch” with the aim of simplifying and centralizing the launch process. …

This post is also a published doc, which you can see here.

For May 2020’s virtual NYC meetup, I had a chance to speak with Matt Galligan, VP of Design at Earnest Research about the various startups he’s co-founded, his passion for distributed teams, Coda docs he’s built for work and personal use, and his membership in the two-letter Twitter club. When I first learned about Matt’s personal use case, I was particularly excited to see what he had to show (spoiler: it involves Clubhouse and Naval Ravikant).

Watch the full replay of the meetup here (Crowdcast replay here):

Employee competency framework

Matt first used Coda for an employee competency framework at Earnest Research that the HR team originally had in a Google Sheet. When Earnest held an internal hackathon, Matt took the opportunity to transform the Google Sheet into a more usable Coda doc that eliminated multi-tab inconsistencies. …

Two new scripts

Last year I published a tutorial on how to sync data between two Coda docs and data between two Google Sheets. What was missing from the tutorial was how to sync data between a Coda doc and a Google Sheet. Writing these scripts was definitely more challenging than the original script I wrote for syncing two Coda docs since the data model for Coda is different from Google Sheets. Please read the caveats below about these scripts to learn about some of the roadblocks I encountered when writing these scripts.

If you are reading this, chances are you have a lot of experience with Google Sheets, Coda, and perhaps the Coda API. I’m going to skip the introduction to Coda as I did with the last tutorial and get straight to the point on how you…