Change Advisory Board - Running a CAB in Wrike?
Has anyone set up a Change Advisory Board to use Wrike for CAB reviews or planning?
We are brainstorming how best to do it - So far, we set up one task named "<month year> Deployment Planning" and then drop the permalinks for all of the IT tickets/tasks in Wrike into the Description of the Deployment Planning task so that it's all viewable in one place. We put the date of the planned deployment in as the Due Date for the Deployment Planning task, and then @mention all of the stakeholders and share the task around for comments.
What I'm envisioning is a Wrike Dashboard that is shared with all stakeholders, where each widget is displaying the IT tickets/tasks that are slated for each month of the year. We might even use Approvals (eventually), but I'm not sure if the approval should be on an umbrella task for the planned deployment each month, or if each task should be individually approved.
Has anyone set up a CAB like this? How did you organize it?
Hi Sarah Dungey,
why do you link your tasks in the description field, instead of adding them as subtasks or assigning them to a project for this matter?
Florian
Hi Florian Kislich,
Adding the individual tasks as subtasks could potentially work - it would still make it easy to tell which tasks were ready for deployment versus delayed or rescheduled. We have been permalinking the tasks into the description to have the "at a glance" view of what tasks are planned and what the status is for each task.
Most (if not all) of these IT tasks are cross-tagged into the project the work is associated with, but these are longer term projects that have smaller sprints completing and launching work, plus ongoing maintenance work for the already launched products. Are you suggesting treating each month's deployment like a project and cross-tagging all of the tasks that are planned for that month into that deployment project?
Thanks for your thoughts!
Sarah
Hi Sarah,
well, if you'd use a project for collecting your tasks, you could use different views to manage them. It would add flexibility and I don't see any disadvantages. By defining a default view for this project, for example as list view, you'd still have your "at a glance" view like you prefer.
Kind regards
Florian
Florian Kislich Thank you for this idea!
I started building this out -
1. create blueprint for monthly deployments (include reminder task to cross tag associated tickets into the project)
2. add tasks for the two potential monthly deployment dates and set the tasks as Milestones.
3. deploy from blueprint and start cross tagging tasks from IT
4. Create a CAB dashboard with widgets pulling the Planned and Backlogged tasks (not milestones) from each month's deployment project and sorting by status (we have an IT development workflow) so that there is an all-in-one-place view of each month's tickets for stakeholder review
5. Create a CAB calendar layer that pulls in Milestones to show the planned deployment dates in context of other work for the organization.
6. Document the structure and schedule a stakeholder orientation!
I have a good feeling about this. Thank you for your help.
Sarah
Thanks, there is so much to learn about Wrike!
I like the potentials here as well. There is something about permalinking inside a description - as that involves a lot of manual data entry and management over time. Whereas grouping them in a folder/project - using cross tagging (or subtasks where applicable) - should allow creation of dashboards - that should help produce the same result. Then organizing your widgets in your dashboard according to "status" of the "collection of these unique tasks/tickets" could generate the view you are looking for.
As as "super nice to have" - I'd love to be able to pull the task description into a report view - that would help you here as well with displaying the data of these "related" tasks .
Just some thoughts!
This is a great idea! I will bring this up to the powers that be to see if we can implement such a process!
This is all great information! I don't think we use Wrike for a CAB right now. The closest thing we have is an approval process for changes to Wrike itself through our governance group. I will keep this in mind if this ever becomes something that would be good to have as our group does a lot of out of the box development work. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing the great information. We use other tools to manage our CAB.
Also, the use of Automation could be helpful as well. Like if a task changes status, add to a specific project or folder, or when status changes @mention specific stakeholders - and you can input specific instruction for what they need to do with it - removing some manual steps.