Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Collaboration.

So, what do we mean by Collaboration at NZRT? At its core, the Collaboration section of our internal systems covers the cross-functional tools that help you and your team work together day to day. Think of it as the connective tissue between people, projects, and time. It brings together four distinct areas: shared calendars and agendas, project and task management, event organisation, and surveys. Each one plays a role in keeping the team aligned and moving in the same direction.

Let’s start with Shared Calendar and Agenda. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering when a meeting is happening, or whether a colleague is available for a quick catch-up, this is where you go. The shared calendar gives everyone visibility into what’s happening across the team. You can see scheduled events, block out time, and plan around other people’s commitments without having to send a chain of emails back and forth. The agenda side of things helps you structure what’s actually going to be covered in those meetings, so time is used well and nothing important gets missed. Whether you’re coordinating across departments or just trying to find a slot that works for three people, the shared calendar is your starting point.

Next up is Projects and Tasks. This is probably the sub-module you’ll spend the most time in. It gives you a structured way to plan and track work from start to finish. At the project level, you’re looking at the big picture — what’s the goal, who’s involved, what’s the timeline. Drill down into tasks and you get the day-to-day detail — individual actions assigned to specific people, with due dates and progress tracking. This means that at any given moment, you can see exactly where a piece of work sits, who’s responsible for it, and whether it’s on track. It removes a lot of the guesswork that comes with collaborative work and keeps everyone accountable without needing constant check-ins. If you’re managing a client engagement, an internal initiative, or anything with multiple moving parts, Projects and Tasks is how you keep it all under control.

The third sub-module is Event Organisation. This one is specifically designed to help you plan and coordinate events — whether that’s an internal workshop, a team offsite, a client presentation, or a training session. Event Organisation gives you a dedicated space to manage the logistics: who’s attending, what needs to be prepared, what the agenda looks like, and how invitations go out. Rather than juggling spreadsheets and email threads, everything related to an event lives in one place. It also connects naturally with the shared calendar, so once an event is confirmed, it shows up where people are already looking at their schedule.

The fourth sub-module is Surveys. Surveys might sound simple, but they’re a powerful way to collect structured feedback and input from your team or from stakeholders. Whether you want to check in on how a project went, gather opinions before making a decision, or run a quick pulse check on team morale, surveys give you a way to do that systematically. You build the survey, send it out, and the responses come back in a format you can actually analyse. It’s much more useful than asking people informally and trying to piece together a picture from casual comments. Surveys close the loop on initiatives and make sure decision-making is grounded in real input rather than assumptions.

Now, the Collaboration module doesn’t sit in isolation — it connects to two other areas of the system that are worth knowing about. The first is Timesheets. Time tracked through Timesheets can be linked directly to projects, which means you get a clear picture of how much effort is actually going into any given piece of work. That’s valuable both for internal planning and for client billing, if that’s relevant to your engagement. The second related area is Interventions, which covers field work. Interventions can also be linked back to projects, so if someone’s out on site doing hands-on work, that activity gets recorded against the right project context. Both of these connections mean that Collaboration isn’t just about coordination — it feeds into a fuller operational picture that spans time, effort, and delivery.

So to bring it all together: the Collaboration module is your hub for keeping work organised and teams connected. You’ve got the shared calendar for scheduling and visibility, projects and tasks for managing work end to end, event organisation for planning structured gatherings, and surveys for collecting feedback and input. Layer in the links to timesheets and field interventions, and you have a system that ties coordination to execution in a meaningful way.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Projects & Tasks.

Projects and Tasks is the part of the NZRT system where you plan, organise, and track your work from start to finish. Whether you’re managing a client engagement, an internal initiative, or a smaller piece of consulting work, this is where you bring it all together — from the initial plan right through to completion.

Let’s start with how a project is structured. Think of it as a tree. At the top you have the project itself — that’s your overarching container for all the work. Underneath that, you break things down into tasks. Each task can be assigned to a specific person, and you can set an estimated number of hours for how long it should take. Then, if a task is complex enough, you can go one level deeper and create sub-tasks underneath it. So for example, you might have a project at the top, then Task One assigned to a team member with ten hours estimated, and underneath that, Task One might have its own sub-tasks — say, research, drafting, and review. Task Two sits alongside it at the same level. This hierarchy lets you get as granular as you need without losing sight of the big picture.

Now let’s talk about what you can actually do with that structure. There are five main feature areas worth knowing about.

First, there’s the Gantt-style timeline view. This gives you a visual representation of your project schedule — you can see which tasks are running in parallel, which ones depend on others finishing first, and how the overall timeline is shaping up. It’s a great way to spot scheduling conflicts or gaps before they become a problem.

Second is time logging and timesheets. As you and your team work through tasks, you log the actual time spent against each one. This feeds directly into the timesheets module, keeping everything connected. You’re not re-entering data in two places — it flows through automatically.

Third, you get budget versus actual tracking for both hours and cost. This is really valuable because it means you can compare what you planned at the start of the project against what’s actually happening. If a task is running over hours, or a project is burning through budget faster than expected, you’ll see that clearly rather than finding out at the very end.

Fourth is billable project invoicing. If you’re working on a client project, you can mark tasks as billable and generate invoices directly from the project. This connects your project management and your finance side, so you’re not copying data across systems or reconciling things manually at month end.

And fifth, you can attach documents to a project. Supporting files, briefs, contracts, reference material — whatever you need to keep close to the work — can live right there alongside the tasks themselves.

Now, Projects and Tasks doesn’t work in isolation. It connects to a few other areas of the system that are worth being aware of.

The Shared Calendar and Agenda ties in with your project timeline, so deadlines and milestones can show up alongside other scheduled events. That helps with visibility across the whole team.

Timesheets, as mentioned, receives the time entries you log against tasks. But the timesheets module also has its own views and reporting, so if you need to look at how time is being spent across multiple projects or across the team as a whole, that’s where you’d go.

And finally, there’s reporting — specifically project profitability reporting. Once your actual hours and costs are tracked against your budget, the reports module can show you whether a project is running at a profit or a loss. For a consultancy like NZRT, this is essential. It tells you whether the work you’re delivering is being captured and billed correctly, and whether your estimates are landing where they should.

So to bring it all together — Projects and Tasks gives you a structured way to break work down into manageable pieces, assign it to the right people, track time and costs as you go, and connect that information through to invoicing and reporting. It’s the central hub for managing delivery, and when used consistently, it gives you a clear picture of where every project stands at any given moment.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.