As the Senior Director of Planview AdaptiveWork’s Global Sales Engineering Center of Excellence, I lead a passionate team that ensures our customers leverage all of Planview AdaptiveWork’s features, tools and functions in their environment, and with their teams. Or in other words: our job is to optimize the WOW factor in the Planview AdaptiveWork innovation machine!
As you might expect, on a daily basis we receive a huge volume of requests and issues related to new projects, travel, sales engineering resources, help desk, BI reports, and the list goes on. Each request and issue is evaluated independently, and may involve any or all of the following: scoring, management approval, resource assignment, internal/external collaboration, co-editing document, closing, etc.
Recently, several customers have expressed an interest in learning how we use Planview AdaptiveWork’s time tracking to ensure that our request and issue evaluation process is streamlined, flexible, generates business insights, and enables scalability. In response to this interest, I thought it would be helpful to provide the following simple 6-step walkthrough (with screenshots). It will guide you on setting up Planview AdaptiveWork’s time tracking feature in your enterprise. From beginning the setup process takes about 15 minutes.
Please also note this feature is not limited to managing and evaluating requests and issues. It can be used for a variety of use cases involving sales engineering teams, professional services teams, customer success teams, and so on. It is a very versatile and powerful feature, yet as you’ll see, quick and easy to set-up and modify!
SIX STEPS TO INCREASED VISIBILITY:
Step 1 – Set up a Project
1. Creating a project that will hold all time entries submitted for requests and issues
Create the project with a milestone named ‘Cases’. All time will be loaded on this milestone.
2. Set the project type to ‘Other’ so it is filtered from reports
3. Make sure the ‘Cases’ milestone is Reportable
Step 2 – Configuring a Custom Field for Time Entries
As an admin user, go to Settings
Go to configure
Select Timesheet from the left side ITEM TYPES and add a new Custom Field:
With the following details:
Total efforts invested
An optional, yet recommended addition, is a custom field to hold the summary of all time reported on a request
1. New custom field at the Cases level
2. Field type: Duration
3. Formula based field of Relations Summary
4. Field Label: Efforts Invested
5. Formula summary type: Sum
6. Relation: Timesheet Entries -> Duration ($R_TimesheetEntries.Duration)
7. Click save and add this field to your views
Step 3 – Setting up the ‘Report Time’ action
1. Select the Cases item type and add a new Custom Action:
2. Give a title (‘Report Time’), with the minimum user input of:
Besides ‘Reported Date’, ‘Time Spent’ and ‘Comment’, feel free to add any important information to be captured at the point of time submission.
3. In the Set Actions section, add a ‘New Item’ action of type Timesheet
Set the following fields for the new timesheet entry:
- $ReportedDate = ReportedDate
- $Duration = TimeSpent
- $WorkItem = ‘M-xxx’ (Click Formula Options -> Objects -> Milestone, to locate the milestone in step 1)
- $Comment = Comment
- $C_ReportedonCase = CurrentObject()
4. At the last section, Success, add: “Time entered successfully’
5. [Optional] It is highly recommended to add a second action to create a new Post item for auto posting the time entered and comment. It drives better alignment and transparency within the team
6. Save and Enable the Custom Action
7. Should look like that when run through the request -> Custom actions -> Report Time:
Step 4 – Add the relation to your profile(s)
1. Go to Settings -> Profiles (as an admin)
2. Select the relevant profile, or the Master Profile to apply to all profiles and choose Request under Cases -> Fields & Relations -> Edit
3. Move the ‘Timesheet Entries’ to the right hand side
4. Repeat #2 and #3 for Issues in case you would like to be able to report time there as well
Step 5 – [Optional] Convert the panel view from Thumbnail to Grid
1. It’s recommended to edit the view and change the Timesheet entries from Thumbnail to grid with the relevant columns showing
Step 6 – Create Reports & Dashboards
Reports and dashboards based on the above data should be freely created based on the specific needs.
An example report can be on a specific request type, looking at how much time reported last month:
1. Run on Requests and their relevant time entries
2. Filter just the requests that are in Opened or In-Work states and time reported for last month
3. Create a stacked bar chart
X-Axis = ..Reported By
Grouping = .Title
Y-Axis = Custom -> ..Duration
4. Will output something like:
If you require additional support setting up this beneficial Planview AdaptiveWork feature — one that we depend on every day to support our internal teams and WOW our customers — please contact your Planview AdaptiveWork Customer Success Specialist.
