Workflow Management (Webinar 28)

Hello everyone and welcome to the I Didn't Know clearpoint Could do that Webinar series. Today we're showing you tips and tricks for a smooth workflow in clearpoint. Here are your smiling hosts. I'm Katherine. And I'm Jenna and as a few housekeeping announcements, we will be recording this session and we'll make it available within a week. The webinar will last about 25 minutes. Time for questions at the end so you can submit your questions to supportlearpointstrategy.com any that we don't get to at the end we'll follow up with via email. On our last installment we tackled project management, covering initiatives, milestones and more. I'd highly recommend checking out that recording on our blog, Vimeo channel or support center. Just search webinar and today we're diving into Part two of our Project and Workflow Management series. We'll tackle managing Action items, show you how to build custom GANTT charts to see a selection of initiatives and milestones, set up some project phases and summary reports to help you streamline your workflow and show you how reminders can help keep your team on the same page. So let's get started. Per usual, we are flying the friendly skies here at Upward Airlines, and in our last episode we talked about initiatives, which are your major projects that you're tracking in order to better your strategic results. We also introduced milestones, the project phases that break your initiatives down into the steps you need to complete. And today we introduce another element that will help you get stuff done. The action item. So action items are like to do list items or tasks. Typically these are items that need to get done but don't require resources to be set aside, right? So something like scheduling a call or following up with someone to check on the status of a reservation. And you can associate action items with any other element in clearpoint, whether it's an objective measure, initiative or risk. Exactly. And there's an easy way to add action items in Clearpoint so that they're linked automatically. I could add a standalone action item from the Manage page if I needed to, just like with other elements. But for now I'm going to bypass this and go into one of our initiatives. Create new Employee Training Now I'll see my Action items field here on the detail page where all the action items are displayed. And I can double click on this to link existing action items or to add a new one. So I'll click on add and we'll name it Setup Meeting to discuss Employee off site and when we click Save, here's where our shortcode comes into play. This action item will appear here in this field, and it's also automatically linked to this initiative, just because we added it here. So we'll click to edit the action item to show more. So here on the Links tab I can see my automatic link to this initiative, and I can also link the action item to any other relevant elements if we want to. Then on the Dates tab, I can adjust the start and end date as necessary. So for an action item, typically the start date would be the date the item was assigned and the end date would be the due date, right? And we can mark it complete here as well, just like an initiative or milestone. You'll also want to make sure to assign ownership on the Edit tab. So we'll click into this Owner menu to select a user and assign this one to me. This will be the person responsible for completing the task. So we always assign our action items at the end of our quarterly review meeting to make sure everyone knows what they're responsible for, right? And having them in clearpoint allows you to eliminate any cumbersome methods of communicating those action items to your team. So rather than making a separate list or going back through post meeting emails to find all those action items, you can add them right to clearpoint during your meeting and then follow through on them here too. There's an even simpler way to have users see and edit action items in one place if you use a summary report, definitely. So let's go over to the Manage Action Item Reports page under Action items. And action items do have their own detail pages, but considering the short nature or small scope that they're typically used for, you might not be updating all that much information about your tasks. So since summary reports can be inline edited, they're a perfect place to maintain the information you need to track about action items at a high level. Let's click here on the plus icon to add a summary report, and we'll call it User Action Item. So then under columns we'll add the name of the action item, the linked objects, so we can see what it's aligned with, find the start and end date, and then we'll also add our comments field so we can give some brief updates about what's going on. Let's click on filters, and this is where Jenna's favorite filter comes in handy. So we'll filter these action items by owner and set the owner equal to the current user. So that'll show only the action items owned by the Current user looking at Clickpoint. So when Katherine clicks Save and goes to that report, all we can see here are the action items that she needs to worry about. Looks like you've got a lot on your plate, Katherine. Yeah, and I can see everything here. It's no problem when I've got one easy place to make all my updates. You could even email this page to your supervisor to give them an update on everything going on. That's a good idea. So you can actually email any page in Clearpoint directly as a PDF. If I go into the Edit menu here and click on Email page, I can select a user's email address. Jenna is going to supervise me today and I'll add a message here. Dear Jenna, here is the status of my action item with my best email etiquette and send it off to her in a flash. And now that I know that Kathryn has completed her one action item, I can send some new tabs her way. Caught me. So you can see we've got a strikethrough here for completed items and the ability to check it right off for the summary report. So it's really clear when our action items have been completed. Now, we did talk about this on our last installment, and I wanted to point out these options for completed items items one more time. So under Admin options and System settings, we can click on Organization and Security and go to the Completed Items tab to see two visual options. Here we can decide whether to show a strikethrough for our completed elements and choose whether to show that checkbox on summary reports to mark them complete. So one more option can also be found in the Manage Scorecards menu and set for each scorecard individually. So let's click to add or edit our corporate scorecard, and on the Completed Items tab, we'll see that we can hide action items that were completed before a certain date. So that's going to allow us to keep this list of action items that we have current, which will hide completed Items completed before June 1st from every view except for the Manage Action Items page. One other thing to keep in mind here is that once an action item is marked as complete or any other element, it will hold the same status and update field values for all future periods. Yep, that's a good point. Now, if you wanted to give users a heads up when they're assigned a new action item, we can use our notifications to do so. And notifications in clearpoint are alerts sent to you after particular changes are made in the system. So any update information that gets Updated period by period can be used as the basis of a custom notification. A change in status, for example, or an empty analysis field. For this notification, we'll want to alert users every time new action items are assigned. So if we go into our Action Item Detail page, we'll see here we've got a custom field called Assigned. That's a Boolean field, so our options are yes or no, and this is the field that we'll want to base our notifications off of. So let's go into alerts and reminders here in the Control panel and click on Notification. This is going to show us a list of all notifications so I can see where I emailed that page earlier. And up here in the right hand corner I can toggle over to Settings to add a notification template and we'll call this new Action item Assigned. So the message is going to be there are new action items in clearpoint. Please look at the User Action item we find all assigned to you. So this is going to direct users to that current User Action item report that we just created. For our criteria, we'll want to send this notification when the assigned field is changed to yes and then for the elements included, you can limit this by Scorecard as well as by the type of element within the scorecard. So we'll include all of our action items from the Upward Airlines Corporate scorecard and then on the Users tab. By default, this notification would just go to me, but I can also send it to the other members of my project team or the other members of my department to make sure everyone's on the same page when new action items are assigned. So we'll click Save and let's go see this notification in action. So we'll go ahead and click into our Action item and make sure that I'm going to notify everyone that this action item has been assigned. This is a great way to keep your team up to date with changes. So when changes are made, they'll receive a notification that tells them to do an action. Like go check out a report. Yep. So here I can see in the notification bell in the top right, I'm being notified that this Action item was updated. The notification is going to tell me to go and check out the user Action item report. So when I go and look there, any new action items that are assigned to me are going to show on this page. Also, you can expect some new and improved notifications features in Clearpoint 11, so stay tuned to see those in our next webinar. In the meantime, let's switch gears a bit and talk about one of my favorite features in clearpoint, the GANTT Chart. So we'll go back to our Create New Employee Training Initiative detail page. You can see at the bottom of our detail page, we have our GANTT Chart here with our initiative and our milestones. So let's go ahead and add a few more milestones and see what happens. I'm going to add a couple milestones at a time by editing my initiative, going to my Milestones tab, and adding multiple milestones. See, we'll call them right curriculum, test the curriculum, evaluate the results, and roll out the training. So I'll save these new milestones, save again, and they will be added to our initiative so we can see them here in our milestones field. And they've also appeared here on our GANTT chart. That's pretty cool, Jenna. That seems like a really easy way to add them all at once. But usually all of my milestones don't have the same dates. So do I have to go back into each one to edit them? Good question, Kathryn. That brings me to my favorite thing about GANTT Chart. You can actually edit your milestones and initiatives from the GANTT Chart on the detail page. So I'll start by double clicking in my GANTT Chart field here. You can see that our editor has appeared on the right hand side. And when I click on the bar for a specific milestone, the name of it comes up here in the right hand editor. I can change my status for this. I can change my start date and my end date here for these different milestones as well. That's awesome. It's so cool to see that pop up right as you're making those changes. And your Gantt Chart looks a lot better now that you've added those color and changed those dates a little bit. I haven't even shown you my favorite part. I can also change the start date and end date of my milestones just by dragging and dropping them here in my Gantt chart. It's a really easy way to line them up with each other to see what I need to work on and when. I can drag the entire bar or I can drag out one end or the other of my different milestones. Wow. That's pretty cool. So speaking of summary reports, you can actually build a custom GANTT Chart to show multiple initiatives and milestones altogether. That's right, Katherine. So we will go to our Manage Initiative Reports page to add a new report. We will name this report our upcoming milestones. And for report type, we want to choose Gantt chart here. So we can select specific scorecards and specific elements to include in our report like we can for standard summary reports. And we can also apply a filter if we want to. So you could filter based on the owner or based on dates. So for this one, let's go ahead and add a filter for our milestone end date. And how about we just show all of our milestones that end before the end of June. So when we save this filter and this report and go to this report, you'll see here this is the initiative we were working on, Create New Employee Training. And we have a few of our milestones, but the ones at the end date were after June won't show up on this page. Awesome. That's a great way to see your projects and initiatives all in one place. So yeah, this is a great way to supplement the default GANTT chart that's shown in every scorecard. And you can get a custom Gantt chart just to show the projects that you want to see. We promised to dive into workflow today, so for now let's talk about how to show project phases for our initiative. We'll go back to our initiative of the hour, Create New Employee Training. And here on the detail page we'll see we have a custom picklist field called Project Workflow or Workflow with four options. So if I double click here, I'll see we have submitted under review and approved and rejected. So here we can assign a phase to each initiative and then change that phase as the initiative progresses. And so having a workflow field like this is another place where the discussion field comes in handy. On our last installment, we showed how discussion can be used to personalize and timestamp comments about an initiative or milestone. And in this case, you might want to use this field to have your project manager or team leader comment here to indicate that a project has been submitted or approved so that you'll have a record of why the phase was changed. You can also use filters to set up summary reports based on these phases. So if we click on our report that we built called Submitted, we'll see all of our projects that currently have a workflow phase of submitted. Yep, exactly. And if we take a look in that Edit Report window, we'll see here on the Filter tab that the workflow phase is being used to filter this report down just to those initiatives where it's set to submit it in the pick list. Now, we do have four separate reports here for each phase, but if we wanted to show all of our initiatives by phase, all in the same place. We can do that at the scorecard level as well. Let's take a look at under scorecards we have an all initiatives report. And what we've done here is set up four data grid fields. So data grid fields are custom fields that allow you to reference summary reports from elsewhere in clearpoint. Right. So just on this page we can have our four summary reports in each of these data grids. You can see that I've selected a scorecard, element type and particular report to be displayed here. And then I'll see my initiatives organized by project phase. And as they move from one phase to the next, I'll see this report change all in one place. So in this case we've used a pick list to show and filter by project phase, but you can use them to segment initiatives and segment your workflow in any way that your organization finds most beneficial. For example, instead of using approval, you could set a priority field with high, medium and low as your pick list options. And dividing up your initiatives like this can help you get an idea of which projects will be completed when, what resources you'll need for each, and what steps are necessary for each phase or project type. And of course, you'll want to make sure these initiatives are actually getting updated. So Jenna, is there any way to give users a little nudge to go in and update their initiative? Sure thing, Catherine. Administrators have the ability to send out an email to users who need to make updates to their elements. In clearpoint, we call these reminders and you can find the menu over here in the control panel under Alerts and Reminders. So let's go ahead and create a new reminder template. We'll talk through the different options here. So first I will name my reminder. We'll call this the first Monthly update. We can change our subject line here if we want as well, say time to make clearpoint updates and you can change the body of the email here. Also, clearpoint defaults by putting in the first name of the user over here. Clearpoint will put in the reporting period that your users need to update, and they'll also pull in a list of the items that the user needs to update so you can customize this however you want. We recommend leaving that item list field in here because it actually pulls a list of the items your user needs to update as well as links to all of those items so they can go to them right from within the email. So each of these tabs on the left hand side is a different filter. We'll start on the recipients tab, and here we can choose if we want to send a reminder to the owners of the elements, the collaborators for those elements, or both. We can also filter this down to send reminders for specific scorecards for elements with a specific status for specific elements. So just objectives, just measures, just initiatives, and also to specific users. So right now I'm just going to send a reminder to Katherine to make sure she makes her updates for this month. Thanks, John. And on the Recipient preview tab, we can see which users are going to receive an email and which elements will be included in that item list for them to update for this period. So I will save this template and now each month when I want to send this reminder to my users to make their updates, I can just come in here, click this Send reminder little envelope icon, select the reporting period and click Send. And now clearpoint will send them an email to update all of their elements. So Katherine, can you check your inbox and show us your reminder email? Sure thing, Jenna. I'm just pulling it up on my second screen here. And here we have my reminder. So if I click on any one of these items, this is going to take me right into that page in clearpoint. So this is an easy way to remind users to update their data and encourage them to get into the system right from your reminders. Email makes it really easy. Yep, there's pretty much no excuse for me. So we've covered a lot of great features today and we want to make sure to leave time for your questions as well. So here's one. What if I want to update my project weekly? Jenna, do you want to take that? Yeah, sure. So one thing you can do is you can date the analysis field. So we're on our initiative here. Conduct thorough review of company policies. And if I scroll down to our analysis field and double click here, if I make. If I want to make more than one update within the month, I can just date my different updates. So maybe this is my update for today and then next week, maybe I want to add another update as well and just date that one. And then I can see all of these updates in one place. But I can provide more than just the monthly update here. Exactly. And this allows you to keep your account standardized with those months, but still have a record each week of what was going on with your initiatives. So here's another good question. What if I don't want to show our internal action items on our briefing books or published reports? You can definitely see this being a use case where you want to have your action items visible on your detail pages, but it totally makes sense that you wouldn't want them in your reports for your leadership team or anything that you're publishing to your website. So this is really easy to do in clearpoint. We'll go ahead and save Jenna's changes, and if I go into our Create New Employee Training initiative, I can edit the layout here in the Edit menu and we'll see that we have several options for each field. If I expand this menu, three of which involve hiding this pod in particular instances. So if I hide it from Print View, that's going to hide the pod from my briefing book. Hiding the pod in online view will hide it when clearpoint is locked or in meeting mode. So if you don't want your action items cluttering your presentation and then Hiding Pod when published will hide this from your published HTML report. So if we click Save here, here's our action item field. If we go ahead and lock clearpoint, that's going to disappear, so it's still accessible, but you can run a meeting without that Action items field on the screen. And that's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time on the I didn't know clearpoint could do that webinar series. And happy reporting.