Tracking stakeholders
We're having trouble coming up with a good way for everyone to track tasks, based on their different roles. We'd like to be able to differentiate between:
- tasks that I'm actively working on
- tasks that I'm responsible for delivering, but that are currently waiting on work or input from someone else
- tasks that I'm not directly responsible for, but that I want to track the progress of
In the absence of some kind of "stakeholder" task field that can be assigned to multiple people, we're having trouble with the latter two. Any thoughts on addressing this kind of thing would be appreciated!
Have you tried creating a dashboard to show this information? I have been building a lot of these for tracking items like this. That would easily handle your first request. As for the second piece, have you tried to used a different workflow for this? IE - Design, Waiting for Approval, Implement Changes, In Final Review, etc. This way you can track items that are depending on someone else in terms of a status.
We do have a number of dashboards, but because we haven't figured out a way to differentiate between these stakeholder roles, everything looks like something we're actively working on, and so they get really cluttered.
As far as workflows, I'm not sure I understand how what you're suggesting would solve our issue. Can you explain more?
First, I would outline the steps or places in the process where you need to be tracking something that might be dependent on another resource. That should give you different statuses that you can leverage to create a specific workflow for the tasks. (There are some Wrike videos on this that I saw if you are not familiar with custom workflows.) You could then report out on those statuses to have a better handle where things are.
The issue we're running into is that different people have different relationships to different tasks, and they're usually unpredictable. For instance, I might do internal review for some tasks, while my colleague might do internal review for other tasks. Also, we have a project manager who creates a lot of our tasks for us, so we can't really make use of the "owner" field.
I see, is there a way you can create a custom field called "ROLE"? Lets say that you and your cohort are have the roll of APPROVER. If you create a dashboard that pulls those tasks in, you can then assign them to yourself if they are applicable or the other approver can assign them to themselves. That way you can work out of a "bucket", Would that work?
You know, I'm not sure if that exact tactic would work, but it did give me an idea. Maybe we have custom fields for the different roles for a given task. E.g. we could have an "internal approver" field, with the appropriate team member's name in it. That way it's something we could set up in our templates to save time. And then when the task goes to "internal review" status, we could easily create a filter for that kind of task in our dashboards.