Ensuring Proper Time Entry with Cloud Coach

Welcome to our sneak peek into the Cloud Coach Deep Dive Track for Delivery 2016: Time and Teamwork

Projects are done by people – not systems. Ensuring that you have given the proper tools to your team is the first step in capturing accurate and dependable data. With Cloud Coach time and teamwork tools, it’s easy for your team to collaborate on project tasks, share documentation, and track their time.

In this session we’ll cover:

Leveraging Meeting functionality to improve project communication
Best practices in project documentation
How integrated Chatter keeps important conversations out of email

Problem:

As a project manager, Dustin is having difficulty getting his team to input regularly the time they are spending on project work. This impacts his ability to estimate future projects accurately, as well as correctly bill his clients. He’s turned to his Salesforce admin to craft a solution to this problem.

Solution:

As an admin, we’ve come up with a three-step solution:

Create a validation rule that prevents a project task from being closed if time hasn’t been entered against the task.
Use a checkbox on the project page to send a chatter reminder to every project task owner
Build a report to determine at a glance if certain users have not accurately recorded their time

Step One

First, we want to make sure that at least sometime is entered on every project task. That’s where a validation rule comes into play. While the validation rule can’t ensure that every hour worked is properly recorded, it can ensure that we’re not closing project tasks without any time entered.

The validation rule itself is simple – when the project task is completed and the entered hours field is null, an error will display reminding the user to enter time. Here’s what that looks like:

Step Two

Once that validation rule is in place, we want to give Dustin a tool to follow up with the team in a way that doesn’t require him to spend a significant amount of time sending messages to each user.

To meet this need, we placed a checkbox field on the Project detail page called Remind Team. When the box is checked, the owners of each project task will be reminded to enter their time.

To make this process work, we need to cascade the information downward through each Project Phase to the Project Tasks. That’s done by creating two processes.

The first process checks a box on the Project Phase page:

When the Remind Team checkbox is selected, an identical checkbox will be set to true on each project phase.

Checking the box at the phase sets off the second part of the process:

A chatter alert reminding the project team to enter time is entered on the Project Task detail page.

At the same time the chatter alert is posted, the original checkbox is set to false. That way Dustin can easily start the process next time he needs to remind his team to enter time.

Step Three

Now that we’ve created a validation rule and a simple mass reminder process, let’s add one more tool to Dustin’s toolbox: an exception report to show who needs to enter more time.

In this report, we want to look at the number of hours entered against a Project Task as compared to the estimated hours and completion percent. Here’s what that looks like in a formula field within a report:

Once that’s been created, we can create a Matrix report to display that information in a way that is easy to digest at a glance. Here we can see the completion % of each Project Task and the % of the estimated hours spent on that Project Task.

If the hours entered are significantly lower than the completion percent, that’s a good indicator that all of the hours worked are not being properly recorded.

Conclusion

And that’s it! Dustin can now rest easy that all his project tasks have had time entered against them and that he’s sent a reminder to each team member. And if he’s still not sure that time has been properly recorded, he has a report that will indicate whether there are any specific individuals he should follow up with.

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