Using Process Builder to Alert Project Managers of Task Health Changes

Brandi Johnson

Jan 5 2016 5 min read

When you’re a busy project manager, keeping track of all of the details for your projects can be challenging. Using Salesforce Process Builder, you can automate notifications, including email alerts or chatter posts to let you know about important changes to the health of project tasks.

Send an Email Alert

In today’s hyper-connected world, you can get emails delivered directly to your wrist, making email alerts a viable method for alerting you, as well as other members of your team, when a project task has gone awry.

To start, consider the following questions:

What should the message be when a task status is red?
Who should receive the message?
When should the alert be sent?

If you’re not familiar with using process builder, you may be tempted to hop right in with building the process. You’ll save yourself a bit of headache, however by starting with your email template.

Step 1: Create your email template. Under Setup > Communication Templates > Email Templates, you can create email templates related to your project processes. In our example, we also created a new folder for email templates related to projects.

Step 2: Create your email alert. Under Setup > Build > Create > Workflow & Approvals, you’ll find the Email Alerts page. Your email alert associates your email template with the project task object, and defines who should be notified by the alert. You can choose from users within your organization, as well as up to five external email addresses.

In our example, we’re going to notify the project owner, as well as two users.

Note: In this process, everyone who is on the recipient list will be notified each time the alert is sent. Consider your recipient list carefully!

Step 3: Create your process. Under Setup > Build > Create > Workflow & Approvals, you’ll also find the Process Builder. The object for this process is the Project Task, and we want to check each time a record is created or edited.

We’re evaluating for if the project task health is Red.

We want the email to send immediately, so we add the action under the Immediate Actions node.

Here’s our full process to send an email alert based on the task health.

This process could be replicated for additional important project components, such as Phase health or Project health.

Once I activate my new process, my project owner will receive a notification each time a project task is updated to “red” status. This is an easy way to ensure your project manager is aware of task changes that may impact the outcome of your project, even when they’re not logged into Salesforce.

AUTHOR

Brandi Johnson

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