Six automations that take hand-offs off your plate

Hand-offs are where client work goes quiet. A job moves into review and the reviewer isn't told. A brief arrives with nobody's name on it. A file is finished, but the client doesn't know it's waiting. None of this is hard to fix by hand. It's just easy to forget, and it happens many times a week.

Project management automation for agencies doesn't need to be clever. The rules that earn their keep are small: when this happens to a job, give it to this person, or tell that one. Here are six, with the thinking behind each, and the limits worth knowing before you write your own.

Why hand-offs slip#

The move itself is the easy part. Dragging a job into Client review takes a second. The follow-up is what relies on memory: telling the client, changing the owner, setting the status.

Three things make that follow-up unreliable:

• Everyone does it slightly differently. One designer @mentions the client, another assumes the board says enough.
• The board and the status drift apart. A job sits in Done but still says In progress, so any count of open work is wrong.
• The cost stays hidden until it isn't. The first sign is a client who waited two days for a review nobody told them about.

An automation turns the follow-up into part of the move, so it happens the same way every time.

How an automation reads in Skybase#

In Skybase, a rule reads as a sentence. When something happens to a job, Only if some things are true, Then do these things.

• When: one trigger. A job is created (in any column, or a column you pick), a job moves to a column, the status changes (to a status, or from one status to another), the priority changes to a level, the assignee changes, or a job is completed.
• Only if: up to 3 conditions on the priority, the job type or the assignee, including "the assignee is nobody". Every condition has to hold.
• Then: up to 5 actions, in order. Assign to someone, add collaborators, set the status, move to a column, set the priority, or notify the assignee, named people or both.

A few rules of the road:

• Only administrators create, change or delete automations. Team members can read them and their recent runs. Guests never see them.
• A project can have up to 25 rules. They run from the top of the list down, and each one sees what the rules above it did.
• Changes a rule makes never set off other rules, so two rules can't pass a job back and forth.
• Everything a rule changes shows in the job's activity under the rule's name, and its notifications carry the name too.
• Move ten jobs at once with a bulk move, and each person gets one notification per rule, not ten.

You'll find them under Project settings, then Automations. Choose New automation, or start from one of the examples on an empty page. How to set up automations in Skybase walks through the editor.

Before you write a rule#

Three decisions make the difference between rules that help and rules that surprise people.

Know which of your columns are hand-offs. In a well-set-up board, columns are stages and statuses are states: Kanban for agencies explains the split. Hand-offs happen when work changes stage, so most good rules start with "a job moves to".

Name each rule for the person who'll read it. The name appears in job activity and in notifications. "Client review hand-off" tells the client why they're hearing from you. "Rule 3" doesn't.

Put everything that happens at one moment in one rule. Because a rule's changes never set off other rules, a chain won't work: if rule A sets a status, a rule that waits for that status won't run. Give rule A the extra actions instead. You have five per rule.

Six automations for agency hand-offs#

Take a small studio, say Harbour Studio, rebranding a client called Northwind. Harbour is made up: it's the example in Skybase's sample workspace. Its Northwind Rebrand board has four columns (Brief, In progress, Client review and Done), and statuses of Not started, In progress, In review, Stuck and Completed. Jobs are typed as Design, Copy, Strategy or Dev.

1. Route new work by job type#

• When: a job is created
• Only if: the job type is Copy, and the assignee is nobody
• Then: assign to Ava Lindqvist

Add a twin rule for Strategy that assigns to Sam Okafor. Whoever raises a job no longer needs to know who does what. The "assignee is nobody" condition leaves alone any job that someone has already given to a person on purpose.

2. Nothing sits unowned#

• When: a job is created in Brief
• Only if: the assignee is nobody
• Then: assign to Maya Chen

Maya, the studio lead, shares out whatever the first rule didn't catch. Keep this rule below the type rules. Rules run from the top down and each sees what the earlier ones did, so by the time this one runs, Copy and Strategy jobs already have an owner, and only the rest go to Maya.

3. The client review hand-off#

• When: a job moves to Client review
• Then: set the status to In review
• then add collaborators: Tom Becker
• then notify Tom Becker

Tom is Northwind's contact, a single-project guest. Adding Tom as a collaborator makes Tom part of the job, which matters twice over. Files the studio posts for approval turn up in Tom's Approvals filter, and due reminders reach Tom as well. Client approvals without the email chain follows that through to sign-off. Tom gets the notification, but never sees the rule itself.

4. Stuck means someone looks#

• When: the status changes to Stuck
• Then: notify Maya Chen

A Stuck status is only useful if someone acts on it. This rule doesn't reassign the job or change its priority, because what happens next is a judgement call. It makes sure the person who makes that call hears about it the moment the job stalls, not at the next stand-up.

5. Critical means everyone knows#

• When: the priority changes to Critical
• Then: notify the assignee and Maya Chen

This is the Critical alert example from the empty automations page, with the studio lead added. A rule's notice goes to everyone it names, even the person whose change set it off. So if the assignee raised the priority themselves, they still get the alert along with Maya.

6. Done means completed#

• When: a job moves to Done
• Then: set the status to Completed

This keeps the board and the status in step. At Harbour, Completed is the status that completes a job, so a job dragged into Done is finished everywhere, Reports included.

If Northwind wants to hear when something is finished, add "notify Tom Becker" to this rule. Don't write a separate "when a job is completed" rule: the status this rule sets won't set off another rule. To clear finished work off the board, use Job Rules in the project settings, which can archive jobs after a set number of days in the final column.

Check what your rules did#

A rule you can't inspect is a rule nobody trusts. Choose Runs on any rule to see its Recent runs: the last 50, each marked Ran, Nothing to change, Skipped or Failed. Every change a rule makes also appears in the job's activity, so anyone asking "why is this assigned to me?" finds the answer on the job.

The switch on each rule turns it off and on. If a column, status, job type or person a rule relies on is removed, the rule switches itself off and says why. Edit it, then turn it back on.

The sample workspace's Northwind project comes with two working rules and their run history: a "Client review hand-off" and "Done means completed". They're worth reading before you write your own.

What automations won't do#

Knowing the edges saves a frustrating afternoon:

• They react to changes, not the clock. There's no "three days after" trigger. For dates, Skybase sends due reminders the day before, on the day and once a job is overdue.
• They don't chain. One rule's changes never set off another.
• They live in one project. Each project has its own rules, up to 25.

A checklist for your first week of automations#

• You know which columns are hand-offs.
• Each rule is named for the person who'll read the notification.
• Type-specific rules sit above the catch-all.
• The client is added as a collaborator when work reaches review.
• Moving to your final column sets a completing status.
• You check each rule's runs after the first few days.

Start with one rule, the hand-off that goes wrong most often, and add the next when the first has earned its place. The same rules carry campaign work between writers, designers and reviewers, as marketing project management in Skybase shows, and every other Skybase feature is on every plan too.