A common issue in many organizations is deciding which ideas should become projects. And of the ideas that will become projects, when should they be executed? In this post we will walk you through a few simple workflows to improve your ability to make those decisions.
There are a number of ways to solve this problem using Cloud Coach tools, but in this case, we decided to use the Project Charter as a top level grouping object for the purpose of planning and approving our potential projects. Related to the Project Charter are Resource Request objects, which capture the estimated level of effort of the projects. From there we used Visual Workflow to allow users to dynamically toggle on/off the Resource Capacity impact of each proposed project. Let’s get started.
1.
First, we’ll need to add the Resource Request object related list to the Project Charter page layout. Once that’s done, we can add Resource Requests with the record type of Work Type (Hours) to the related list. As you can see in the screenshot, these represent specific workloads by Work Type. In essence, these are a simplified model of your project and it can be as simple or complex as you would like.
2.
Now that we’ve created some Resource Requests, we’ll want to lay the groundwork for the workflow we will be building. On the Project Charter object, we created a Checkbox field called Show in Capacity. This will directly drive the Visual Workflow that we are going to build momentarily. The idea being that anytime the box is checked, it will turn on or off all the Project Charter’s associated Resource Requests.
In addition to that formula, we’ll want to create a Checkbox formula that is True or False based upon the value in the Show in Capacity checkbox on the Project Charter. This will help us ensure that only the correct records are updated.
3.
Now we can create our Visual Workflow, which is a single Record Update node:
Within the Record Update we have two sets of criteria: 1. a Resource Request where the ‘Show in Capacity’ formula checkbox equals True 2. the Project Charter ID equals a variable called CharterID. That variable will be filled by a process that’s fired when someone checks the ‘Show in Capacity’ box. If both of those things are true, all Resource Requests that meet this criteria will have their Active checkbox field set to True.
Once that’s built, we’ll use Process Builder to fire the Flow. In the criteria section, any Project Charter that has the ‘Show in Capacity’ checkbox set to True will launch the flow.
