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When My Week cards move out of Done back into My Week

Looking for some My Week process suggestions! We are pretty new to My Week, so as we start using it we’re encountering scenarios we hadn’t anticipated!

Key points of our processes:

  • The Work Assignee for us stays consistent through the whole process of completing the piece of work
  • Each piece of work generally has three people involved - a preparer, a reviewer, and a final senior review before the work is delivered to the client
  • Some types of work will have a couple of touch points for the preparer and reviewer
  • Current ownership of work is based on the status (e.g. Initial Preparation means the work is currently with the Preparer, when the status changes to Client Blocker it’s owned by our client success team to follow up on etc.)

Problem:

Once a preparer has completed their first set of tasks, it makes sense for them to move the card into the Done bucket, but based on this page, a change in Status is not a trigger for a card to move back out of Done and into This Week. This means that if the status changes, it may get missed.

Possible solutions:

  • Have the team move cards back into To Plan if there are additional tasks that will come back to them at a later date
  • Have the team move cards to Next Week if there are additional tasks that will come back to them at a later date
  • Keep moving them to Done but the team first check their work view which is filtered with the statuses they “own”, and do their work item planning into My Week using the Planned Week column to manually move it out of Done
  • Something else???

17 replies

SamG
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Looking forward to hearing more here!

Interestingly enough, our process/es are similar, so:
- assignee stays consistent
- I rely on checking Work views to follow up Work
- I move things to Next Week or This Week (out of Working on now) if more for me to do later
- maybe we do need to work on reassigning Work*
*Client/Work teams need a tidy up though - only Assignee (Preparer), Client Manager (Reviewer) and Client Owner (Principal) are all correct - which is why we didn’t need to change assignee to run Work views that told us what we needed to know

DianeK
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I would also be interested in This information.  There are a lot of items in my week where I don’t have a tasks until the very end.  I really wish there was a view or filter so I could see items currently assigned to me, not just where a task will be assigned to me at a later date.

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Rebecca Williams
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@SamG @DianeK it’s always nice hearing of others with similar workflows/problems! 

I thought about making a feature request to pop something back into My Week when the status changes, but that would possibly be more annoying if you weren’t needing to be involved again!

At this stage I’m leaning towards the team moving items back into To Plan if their involvement isn’t complete, but I’m still worried about the ones being moved to Done that will fall through the cracks!

Continuous Improvement
kylenecarse
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@Rebecca Williams I love all these ideas.  I think a Feature Request would be a good idea still.  :)

SamG
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There are a couple of good feature ideas here that I think would help alleviate the issue of getting an item back into This Week/Working On Now from Done when the time is right (someone tells you it’s back with you via a notification in Triage). You (both) have already voted on them!

 

Rebecca Williams
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@SamG I’ve voted on loads of My Week requests!

I think my issue specifically for those times when the only thing that changes in status, which won’t trigger a work item to move out of Done or pop into Triage. We’re trying to move to a pull method where you work on what’s in your list based on status, rather than what someone notifies you of in your triage (push), to cut down on notifications and this is an unintended consequence!

Given status is our key trigger for when someone needs to work on something and ownership changes, I can see things getting missed if the card has been moved to Done. We are also reviewing Work Views based on status filters so we should pick them up there 🤞🏻

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SamG
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Yeah, I can understand that! Hmm, not sure the logic that could be used for when status changes, move  back into this specific person’s My Week. The answer may be that we both need to rework workflow so assignee changes as well (because then change of assignee could follow a logic to put the item back into that person’s My Week).
Work views still necessary (and may be forever - for checking things not falling through the cracks!)

Rebecca Williams
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To summarize and answer my own question:

  • Created a feature request to move from Done to This Week based on the Task Status change (instead of Work Item status)
  • Work around for the team to move cards into To Plan when there will be future tasks to be completed in a work item, but current tasks are complete
  • Monitor and plan weeks for work cards based on Work View dashboards to identify those that have potentially fallen through the cracks and ended up in Done
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max
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I really like swapping the work assignee around to he person actually working on the work. We have all of our work items swap back and forth with automations, so the process doesn’t add any extra work.

I love that you are working on a pull system instead of push system, so I see the benefits of not lighting up someone’s triage when work is assigned. For us, it would be more confusing NOT to switch the work assignee, but a feature request to turn off work assignee triage notifications would help with the pushiness.

Interesting discussion. 😀

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DianeK
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@max We also use automation to change the work assignee to whomever the current task is assigned.  This works really well, but I still see the work in My Week because I have a section that will get assigned to me in the future.  I really wish it wouldn’t show up in my week unless it is assigned to me currently or maybe a better option would be to have a filter to see only work currently assigned to you.  This way you could look at your current assignments or future assignments.

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Rebecca Williams
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I love that you are working on a pull system instead of push system

@max I think it was one of your posts that triggered my thinking in this way!

 

Based on how Karbon currently works, changing assignee would make it hard to create some dashboards and see a full team picture for a client - we essentially need one more role that is able to be a filter in work views! Our client teams have 3 people, so we’re having to use Work Assignee as a de facto role as that field is available in views. I made a feature request to have more roles available as filters in views so 🤞🏻

 

I really wish it wouldn’t show up in my week unless it is assigned to me currently or maybe a better option would be to have a filter to see only work currently assigned to you

@DianeK same - it would be great if it could add to a specific week based on the Task date, not the Work date!

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SamG
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we essentially need one more role that is able to be a filter in work views! Our client teams have 3 people, so we’re having to use Work Assignee as a de facto role as that field is available in views.

Same @Rebecca Williams! My new plan is to tidy up Client Team this week so that the third person can use this as their filter in Work views.. then we’ll work on getting templates right so we can assign Work (utilising automators) based on whose desk it’s on (which I understand is the idea behind assignee - but was easier to use that field differently in the interim, than get all Client Teams updated/right and templates updated/encourage reassigning throughout the process).
In case you’re interested @max, it works okay for us not ever assigning Work to Owner (Principal) or Manager (Reviewer), as we (Managers/Principals) can filter on Work where we are that role and the Work status is one that would be with us (e.g. Queries Drafted/First Review/Further Review).

max
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I’m having a difficult time visualizing how you are doing it. I would love to see it in action. It might be that we are not using work teams, so that’s why it’s disconnecting in my head. We have different departments for different work (Admin, Bookkeeping, Accounting & Tax). I don’t really like this structure, but it’s what we have now.

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Jonathan Gibson
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You all seem to understand My Week quite thoroughly given the complexities being discussed here - do you mind sharing how your teams have been able to adopt this? This seems quite a bit more complex and nuanced compared to a to-do list with tasks, and we’re going to need to train quite specifically if we adopt My Week. Moving work tiles between different statuses (done, to plan, etc.), knowing when a work tile may come back to your week automatically vs. manually, etc….these take a while to get used to so you can make a fast decision and then get back to actual work.

Rebecca Williams
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@Jonathan Gibson I felt the same as you until a couple of months back - I understood the idea at a high level, but couldn’t quite wrap my head around it! It was until I started using it myself that I worked out the best use cases for our team, and was able to roll it out. There’s a few things we are doing that I think are helping. Full disclosure - we only rolled it out to the full team at the start of July! We have about 60-70 people in our delivery team using Karbon and My Week.

  • Our team had never really integrated To-Do into our workflow as it was so busy (40 pieces of work a month, with 40 tasks in each piece of work led to GIANT to-do lists so no-one used them). I think this helped with adoption of My Week somewhat as it was obvious how My Week was more beneficial.
  • I used it myself for about a month before we started asking anyone in the team to use it. I did some testing to make sure I understood various intricacies and the general workflow at a high level.
  • We rolled it out with a small team of about 6 for a few weeks, and I met with them weekly so they could ask questions and we could work out what things I hadn’t thought of.
  • Before we “launched” it with the full team, we had about 3 weeks of preparation (while we tested with the small team) during which time the team did the My Week training in Karbon Academy, reviewed the Emails and Notes in their To-Do list and added them to My Week, and reviewed the To Plan bucket to move a lot of extraneous items into Done (e.g., work that had been fully reassigned to other people, work that was complete or cancelled etc.)
  • I put together a Karbon Guide outlining all of the ways our company uses Karbon, with links to the Karbon knowledge base for the technical how-to. This included a section outlining how My Week should fit into their daily flow of work.
  • I’m now meeting with our team leads (about 6 people) weekly this month to identify additional gaps in training, hygiene issues we need to get cleaned up that make it less useable and answer their questions.
  • Based on the feedback from the team leads, I update our training materials/Karbon Guide and disseminate that out to the wider team with the leads supporting their teams.
  • For a short while I would randomly select names (using a random name generator) and take a look at their My Week, then send them some tips about how it looked like they were using it.

I hope that helps!

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David Perry
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I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE My Week and we are a small team, but have been using it since it came out and had to work through it’s intricacies at first.  


I was reading through these, maybe I missed it, but did not see the task status “ready to start” mentioned above, and this was the key for us to move work items in and out of my week effectively to the right person, maybe I’m late to this conversation…. 

For our month-end template for example, there are multiple stages to this process, and we have automators set up, so the work shows up in the assignee’s my week at just the right time in the process.

We heavily use the work status to tell us where an item is in the process (in the work view we can filter by work “month end” and select the columns as “status” and get a quick overview of all our clients in the kanban view to see where they are all at). 

Meanwhile, when the previous section is complete, the automators do several things in the following section: 

  • The assignee may at this point be assigned or update
     
  • The status changes to update it has moved to the next section of the work (which also helps us prioritize work in my week)
     
  • VERY IMPORTANT:  “When all tasks in the section above have the status “complete” change the status of ALL OF THE TASKS in this section to “Ready to Start” 

    Having the task status change to “Ready to Start” is essentially what prompts the work item to show up (or back up) in someone’s my week.  When all the assigned tasks in the section are complete, the work item in my week is grayed out because all of your tasks are complete and you can then mark it as “done” in my week. 

    If there are sections/tasks to be completed later, after someone from your team completes the next section, or the client completes all the request tasks, it will pop back up in my week once the work progresses to that section, as long as the automator is set up to change the planned tasks to “ready to start” when prior sections are completed. 

    It’s magical. 


In response to:  “Monitor and plan weeks for work cards based on Work View dashboards to identify those that have potentially fallen through the cracks and ended up in Done”

….you can avoid a lot of work items from falling through the cracks this way and you don’t have to figure out wiich items to mark as done or need to be planned for another week this way.  When automators are set up correctly, we’ve had no need to check work to plan for items that have fallen through the cracks, because the automators  have helped us seal up those cracks.
 

Rebecca Williams
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@David Perry thank you for the detailed notes! I’ll do some testing around the changing task status - I believe we already have all the automators in place changing tasks to Ready to Start, but I haven’t looked too closely at how they relate to My Week as our processes are centered around work item status instead. We have some historical mess when it comes to tasks due to poor Karbon hygiene that we’re working through to get cleaned up, so I’ll keep this in mind!

Continuous Improvement

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