How can I assign team members to work on project tasks?
As a project leader, you need to quickly and efficiently assign team members to work on your project tasks. With...
Projects aren’t done by systems – they’re done by people. The convenience and usability of your project management tools can have a significant impact on how well your team is able to complete project tasks.
Cloud Coach makes it easy for your team members to view and update all of their project tasks, across multiple projects, from a single location.
On the Collaboration Tab, your users can see all of their currently assigned tasks across all projects. You can quickly update information like completion status from this screen, or drill into the details of any task.
As with other Salesforce pages, the fields that are visible to the project team member are configurable. This allows you to show your team members the information that’s important for them to complete their work, like due date, while keeping other fields confidential.
Using Chatter on the project task, you can share documents and discuss the task. The conversation and documents are stored with the task in Salesforce, so the important details don’t get lost in email.
Task Status
On the Task page, you can also track the status of the task. This is updated automatically by the system so that your project reporting is always up-to-date based on the completion status entered by your team members. From a not-started status, tasks move into either “In Progress” or “Not Started – Late.” The “Not Started – Late” status is important as a project manager so that you can report on late starting work.
When a task is in progress, but is not completed by the due date, then status is updated to “In Progress – Late”, giving project managers another reporting metric to measure the timely delivery of their project.
When a task is Completed, Cloud Coach will automatically notify the team members assigned to any dependent tasks, letting them know that they can begin work on their part of the project. This automated messaging makes sure that your project continues moving forward without waiting on an email or meeting to update the status.
Task Time Entry
Once a task has moved to “In Progress”, you can enter time against the task using the Quick Time Entry Widget in the left-hand column of the page.
Cloud Coach tracks three key time-related values:
- Estimated hours: The hours you expect the task to take to complete.
- Entered hours: The sum of total hours entered against the task by all users so far
- Project hours: An automatically calculated projection on how many hours we think this task will take to complete based on the time entered so far and the current completion percentage of the task
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Any time on a task that the projected hours on a task exceed the estimated hours and automatic alert will be sent to the project manager as an early warning.
Task Health
Task “health” is used as a way for the team to flag any issues or concerns about the task. Task heath can be set to Green, Amber, or Red – like a traffic light.
Heath is typically used for non-quantifiable items such as “The client isn’t engaged” or “Having trouble getting sign off.”
Task History Tracking
Any project task by every user is automatically logged in the history tracking section, which gives you a full audit trail on who changed what and when for key metrics during your project.
AUTHOR
Brandi Johnson
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