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Hi everyone! I'm looking for advice on the best way to structure Airtable for my program and project management needs. Should I use one base or split it into multiple bases? Are there any training resources or templates you'd recommend instead of building from scratch?

What I'm Managing: I oversee a year-long program with multiple projects that launch each quarter. I need to track everything at both the program and project levels.

Program-Level Requirements:

  • Annual roadmap showing all projects by quarter
  • OKR tracking that connects to relevant projects
  • Capacity planning across all projects
  • Status reporting with different views for various stakeholders
  • Risk visibility across all projects
  • Intake form for new project requests into the program

Project-Level Requirements:

  • Task management and tracking
  • Task-level status reporting
  • Individual project risk tracking
  • Project capacity planning

I'm trying to figure out the best way to link everything together so I can roll up project data to the program level while still maintaining detailed project views. Any thoughts on base structure, table relationships, or existing templates that might work for this use case? 

Thanks in advance for any guidance!


Note: Some projects will have 2-300 tasks per project, different stakeholders and different teams
FYI - I also have a similar question about our projects setup. Should we have one base, or multiple?
My company has also deactivated the AI functionality so I can’t use that to help me setup this structure

​@Arayas24 

Welcome to the community!

The best advice that I can give you is to keep everything together in one base.

Once you start splitting things up into multiple bases, you end up with endless amounts of technical challenges that will affect every part of your workflow.

Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons to separate data into multiple bases, but in 99% of cases, this is not the best path to go down.

Once you have everything in one master base, if you want to shield certain stakeholders & teams from seeing stuff that isn’t relevant to them, you would use Airtable’s interfaces feature to only show people the information that they need to see.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

 

If you’re the only one using it then I’d say stick it in one base and call it a day.  If you had multiple teams using it then you may want to consider using different bases, with the main considerations being that they’d have to share the base limit of 50 automations, and they might accidentally get in each others way

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For training resources and a template, try out the ‘Quick Start’ section of the Airtable Academy?  They’ve got a Project Management one where they’ve got a template and guide you through it in videos: 

https://academy.airtable.com/quick-start-the-marketing-agency-project-management-template

I’d say don’t get overly attached to it though, get through that course to get the basics and then try creating your own base.  Your business logic’s always going to be somewhat different, and creating it yourself from the ground up will be easier than disentangling someone else’s template to work with your flow, you know what I mean?

Hey ​@Arayas24 for a high level understanding of Project Management database architecture and some fun automations, you might want to check out this video!

 


As mentioned by Scott above, I would highly suggest to handle everything within one unique base if possible.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

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