Welcome to Baton! Your vendor has chosen to pass the Baton back and forth using our platform. We provide transparent task management for both you and your vendor’s organization to make implementations smooth and quick. In this guide, we’ll walk you through our product and how to pass the Baton!

This article contains the following sections:

The main view for a project Lead is the Status Tracker. This breaks out each milestone of the project and shows its status. A milestone is a group of tasks in sequential order to deliver an incremental result. The bars will darken as tasks are completed by your team and the vendor. The colors indicate milestone status and are set automatically based on how tasks are being completed by both you and your vendor:

Grey - Queued

Green - On Pace

Yellow - At Risk

Red - Delayed

Blue - Completed

To the right, you’ll see a Project Quickview. This has all of the high level details and documents for the project. If you ever need to email another stakeholder, you can click on the envelope icon and send a message. That can be shown and hidden by hitting the i icon in the top right corner.

Our Baton Projected Completion Date for a project looks to accurately predict when an implementation will finish based on how it is progressing. It looks at all tasks in the project, estimates a completion date for each, and sets the project to be complete when the final task is complete.

To calculate when a task will be complete, we consider its status, start date, due date, duration (in effort hours if given), and the projected due date of its parent task's status. Then, we compare this data to today's date to assess the date we expect a task to be completed.

When a task is not started, we assume the entire duration will be needed to complete a task. These will be the hours estimated over eight hours a day or working days between the start and due date when hours are not given. Once a Baton user marks the task in progress, we will count down the days remaining from the started date, which can be overridden. If a task's started and/or completed date has been overridden, we use the overridden value.

Risk classification in Baton occurs for projects and tasks based on if they will be completed early, on time, or late. If a project or task is expected to be late, how late is essential to classifying the riskiness of a project being completed on time. If a project or task is expected to finish on time or early, it will show low risk. For determining if later tasks and projects should be medium or high risk, we look at the number of projected days late and the time between the current date and the entered due date. If the projected number of days late is less than 10% of the number of days between the present and due dates, we give the project a medium status. There is still time to get the project or task on track. Otherwise, we denote a high risk to the project or task.

Baton has an automatic risk classification system that assesses whether a project will be done on time or late. Risk classifications include:

Green - On Pace. You should finish ahead of the deadline.

Yellow - At Risk. You’re a bit behind pace, but there’s still a good chance you can hit the deadline.

Red - Delayed. A project is behind pace and not expected to finish on time.

If you want to dig further into your project, you can select Tasks and view each task for your team. You can see the project status bar at the top moves from left to right as the project progresses and tasks are completed. All tasks are valued equally. Below there, you can see progress for each milestone. If a milestone is completed, it will note if it was done on time or late.

In the center of the screen, we see each task for the project broken out by milestone. We can see (from left to right) each task’s status, name, start date, due date, and assignee. If a task has been completed, started, or is late, it will also indicate how many days ahead or behind the task is.

Task rows have symbols to quickly show their status, dependencies, or if they're hidden. Here are what the symbols mean:

Task with a dependency

Parent task

Parent task with a dependency

New activity in the activity log

To view each task’s details click on any row. A menu with task details will pop out. This will contain the following information:

Name - The name of the task

Start Date (optional) - The date a task is expected to start

Due Date - The date a task is due to be completed

Task Assignee - User who is responsible for completing the task. You can reassign if you need.

Dependency (optional) - What other task must be completed before this task gets started?

Attached Document (optional) - Any documents needed for context of the project.

To start for your tasks, tasks will be assigned to you as the team lead. You can reassign tasks to users on your team. If they don’t have an account yet, no problem. They’ll get an email prompting them to make an account and you can continue setting up the project.

To update a task status, click on the status button in the task row or task drawer to the right and select the desired status.

As a task is being completed, you can note progress in the "Activity" tab of this view. Activity will pull in timestamps of different events, such as when a task is created or completed. You can also add a comment and tag your peers, which triggers a notification to their inbox. Important comments can be highlighted, as well.

Adding attachments to your tasks can be done by clicking on link or upload an attachment. You will then be prompted to create a title, paste the link, upload, and the ability to link or multiple attachments. Individual files can be uploaded up to 500MB with no limit on the amount of files that can be uploaded. Also, you will have the option to rename, delete, copy, and change the link to any attachment by clicking the attachment menu button (3 dots to the right of any attachment).

Baton will accept links from any repository (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive). You can then easily locate and open all linked attachments by clicking the `i` icon located in the top right of all your projects.

The Timeline (aka Gantt) is a visual representation of a project and the steps needed to complete it, including details about each step, such as who is responsible for completing it and any task dependencies. With this view, everyone can see how a project is progressing, task ownership, what's on time and what's delayed.

The Timeline view is automatically generated based on details in the Task view, so it will always be in sync with any changes you make to the project and its tasks. At a glance, you can compare how your tasks are progressing against their baselines by viewing the task bars. A green trailing task bar indicates a task was completed early and will also show the number of days it was completed early. A red leading bar indicates a task was completed late and will also show the number of days it was completed late.

A black vertical bar will help show today's date, or you can simply click on the Today button in the top navigation bar to bring you to today's date. You can also zoom in our out using the view menu and can filter tasks by project team member, company, risk level, task status, and due date.

To the left of the Timeline view is the timeline outline. Use this to adjust your view by collapsing milestones or the whole outline itself. Here, you can edit, add, delete tasks and milestones to adjust your timeline on the fly.

The Team page shows the Leads, Vendor and Client Contributors and Stakeholders. You can view your project team and add additional team members here.

As you complete tasks as a team, the project will automatically move from milestone to milestone and phase to phase until it’s complete. Once all tasks are done, a project will be complete. While the project is progressing, Baton will assign a risk value based on the likelihood of it finishing on time. This is based on an aggregation of how on time tasks are being completed. Risk values are:

Green - On Pace. You should finish ahead of the deadline.

Yellow - At Risk. You’re a bit behind pace, but there’s still a good chance you can hit the deadline.

Red - Delayed. A project is behind pace and not expected to finish on time.

Once a milestone has been completed, you can give feedback if you are the client lead for that project. To give feedback, go to the Project Plan view and click the star in the lower left hand corner. Select the milestone on which you want to give feedback to the vendor lead.

You can enter a 1-5 star rating and any comments you have. You won’t be able to edit the feedback.