Repeating workflows - Best practises?

  • 17 January 2024
  • 5 replies
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Alex Skipper
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Wondering if people can share their thoughts on the best practises around repeating workflow and work generation as my team have gone in a few different directions on this and ultimately gone full circle on a couple of these not factoring in the implications of certain things.. Would love to hear what has / hasn't worked for others and see if there is a consensus on this..

 

CREATE WORK

Initially we had by default about a years worth of stuff but we found that this spammed our to plan area which was fairly annoying and then ultimately changed to only create a day before.. The issues we faced with jobs only generating a day before were

  • Not able to look forward regarding future jobs i.e. how many jobs do we have next month next year so on and so forth.
  • Where clients forwarded information we were not able to save this on to the required timeline as the job was not generated therefore could only go on to a separate timeline.

I understand that with recurring jobs we also have the ability to instead of having the jobs land in ‘planned’ on my week that you can also set these to start week or due week however we initially avoided this as we thought it would be better for people to physically move these in to there own week.. In reality the team struggle to move the tasks out of planned and it is a management burdon to ensure the the team move things in to a planned week.. What have others experience been with having work automatically flow in to your own week? Thinking about it it sounds like this may be simpler you just need to ensure that you review this and push things in to later weeks when things can not be achieved? This would also resolve the issues that I experiences around having jobs create say a year in advance as there would not be mass tasks in to plan..

I am now considering having jobs create 1 cycle in advance i.e. monthly bookkeeping or management accounts creates 1 month in advance, quarterly VATs 3 months in advance and annual accounts 1 year in advance. My thought this may be the best balance between having those future jobs on the system and not clogging up to much. 

TASK creation

Very similar to the work creation.. More to do with whether you regularly add / adjust tasks from the standard workflow.. Interested in peoples thoughts on this...

 

 

5 replies

SamG
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Hi @Alex Skipper,

Great questions.. we’ve landed basically where you have:

All repeating work is created one cycle in advance (annual work, 1 year, quarterly work, 3 months, monthly work, 1 month).

Tasks are usually 2 weeks before work start date and this seems to work well (e.g. it’s not usually created before the work item before is completed). If anything is unique about the the work we do for the client or we need to remind ourselves to do something in their work, we always add new tasks. Wouldn’t have heaps, but I’d say about 20-30% of work items have at least a couple of custom tasks.

We have some in To Plan and some automatically going to Week Due.. I think either way you have work to do, because if you’re like us, your start dates or due dates aren’t sent in stone and so work gets moved around a bit.

Two things we did that mean My Week works very well for almost everyone*:

We made a rule that everyone has to keep To Plan - 0. Everyone has managed these relatively easy once achieved the first time (easier than maintaining Triage 0).

We review everyone’s My Week every day in our 10min huddle. Everyone makes an effort to update it before the huddle and then it gets referred to by them in the huddle (occasionally someone misses updating it one day, but usually caught up the following day or so).

*The very senior staff with high email volume and lots of work to manage, have a harder time than the other staff - but it’s not impossible.

I hope that helps 🙂

Rebecca Williams
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@Alex Skipper We went through this same dilemma and here’s what we ultimately went with:

This ensures we can always see 1 one month ahead for all work/tasks, and other than weekly, only 1-3 future work items are created in advance so we can tag to future timelines if need be. Task creation 1 month in advance means it shows in My Week for people involved in the work a month in advance, even if the work isn’t assigned to them. Anything greater than 1 month risks changes not being pulled forward, but our delivery team shouldn’t be making changes to tasks anyway.

We also put all our guidelines for creating work in a document so it’s consistent e.g. naming conventions, repeat frequencies, start/due dates, timing of tasks, link to the template to use etc.

We did one big clean up of all existing work items about 18 months ago to make them consistent with this, and then we periodically do random audits to check.

Continuous Improvement
SamG
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Userlevel 7
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We also put all our guidelines for creating work in a document so it’s consistent e.g. naming conventions, repeat frequencies, start/due dates, timing of tasks, link to the template to use etc.

We did one big clean up of all existing work items about 18 months ago to make them consistent with this, and then we periodically do random audits to check.

I have a repeating Karbon Work item to check Karbon Work items 😅 slowly fixing the few inconsistencies that remain.. we need a guideline for naming conventions, but don’t have it yet..

C
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How have people handled this where the work item will be completed by different people each year? We are getting lots of ‘planned’ jobs appearing a year before the start date which is quite annoying. We’ve had to create the tasks at the same time as the work item as we were told that when the tasks&budget are created, they will pick up the roles assigned of the previous year (but we want them unassigned as they will be assigned once records have been received). This means we have to create the tasks&budget before the previous year work item is started.

Any recommendations??

SamG
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Userlevel 7
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@Clare Bushnell, my only suggestion would be you could set up a “To Be Assigned” colleague (invite a fake colleague using a firm email but don’t accept the invite), then setup your repeating work to assign it to this colleague. Each year you’d then reassign the work from To Be Assigned to the colleague who will do the work that year. It won’t help with the budget & tasks assigned.. what you’re doing is the only way to handle it (avoid it being assigned when created). Unfortunately Karbon doesn’t handle well when the work team changes year to year and it is a challenge to maintain.

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