Activity Tracking...

Today I did some research on activity tracking within Changepoint. Activities defined by Changepoint from the help file...

Activities enable users to keep a record of all internal and external interactions and to monitor everyday tasks. Activities can include such items as conference calls, demos, proposals, and telephone calls. Activities can link to company, opportunity, or engagement profiles to provide a full history of customer interaction. To create an activity for a company, engagement, or opportunity, the related record must exist in Changepoint. Users can also create a personal activity which does not require a Changepoint reference.

Here's the skinny on what that means - an activity can be tracked directly to a company, an opportunity, an engagement, or to the user. Each activity has to select a pre-defined type - either a conference call, phone call, meeting, or to do. Each activity has a description, status, and time attributes. Additionally an activity can be connected to a contact and can include related knowledge. Here's an example of an activity linked to a company.

Activities can be created in one of two ways - first method is by being in the Activities application. The Activities application presents your currently open activities in a spreadsheet type of format. There is a filter bar on the bottom to add in historical activities, to search by date range, or by activity link (company, engagement, opportunity, personal).

The second method of creating activities is from the company, engagement, or opportunity applications directly. As mentioned in previous posts - the key is the Actions hyperlink at the top and within the Create sub-menu is the ability to create an Activity. The Changepoint system will go ahead and default in the current record's information.

There is a third method of creating activities worth mentioning which occurs outside of the Changepoint system. If the Outlook Integration Tools are installed, it is relatively easy to pick an e-mail and create an activity out of the mail message. Relevant data will be defaulted in and the opportunity to attach the e-mail as a related knowledge item will be given. Do note that the user has to link to a company, engagement, or opportunity once the data is brought into Changepoint.

Viewing activities can be done in one of three spots. The first is within a portlet on your home page. The My Activities portlet displays all scheduled activities which the start date is on or before tomorrow's date giving you access to all historical, current, and up to tomorrow information. The second spot is from the Activities application itself. The third place is from the company, engagement, or opportunity detail display. Again, the Actions hyperlink is key and there is a View sub-menu for Associated Activities which will display all activities for the selected folder (folder being the company, engagement, or opportunity).

To implement or not to implement, that is the question. Activity tracking can be a rather useful tool, but I believe that there are a few flaws that make activity tracking limited in its usability for an implementation team focused on projects.

Projects being the key word. Company, opportunity, engagements, personal - those are the links which are great if you're on the sales side of the equation.

But what about engagements? The engagement level is an administrative level that is too high for the consultant to deal with. The hierarchy is engagements which track the budget, projects which tracks the hours, and tasks which break down the project into individual objectives.

Therefore any Activity data captured at the currently available links becomes lost in the shuffle of the user interface and impractical for actual use. If only the activities could be linked against the project!

Additionally, there is no tie into the Offline Browser without taking the Activity as a saved report. This has very limited functionality for two reasons. First, the consultant would have to save each activity as a saved report which would be a huge waste of time. Second, the data is static - only there for review. The Offline Browser does not have the functionality to create or modify Activities.

Finally, what's really interesting is why activities are NOT linked into Changepoint's own calendar. For instance - if I set an activity of 2pm to have a conference call with a client - that activity does NOT show up on my calendar within Changepoint!

I believe I'll make an educational presentation next week - but keep it short and sweet without high expectations of actual consultant use.

Understanding the Offline Browser...

I've worked this afternoon with the Changepoint Offline Browser to get a better understanding of its capabilities and how it will work for our team.

Straight from the user guide, the following are the defined functionalities of Changepoint's Offline Browser...

The following functions are available when working offline:

• Task status updates
  
• Time booking for any task you are assigned, as well as non-project time.
  
• Time submission
  
• Create expenses for any project for which you have a task assignment or are the Project Manager
  
• Ability to save certain online reports and profile pages for offline viewing
  
• View the resource profiles of all or a selected group of resources in Changepoint
  
• View customer and contact profiles based on those included in your My Contacts list in Changepoint Browser
  
• Create new company and contact records and maintain existing records
  
• View project profiles for projects that are related to your task assignments
  
• View task profiles for tasks that are related to your task assignments
  
• An Offline Browser Home Page with notifications of items requiring your attention
  
• Create new opportunities and maintain existing records

Breaking that down, what is the real functionality of the Offline Browser? I would define it as four functions - people, task reporting, expense reporting, and historical review.

People
There are three subjects related to people. My Contacts - which displays information about project contacts - useful for keeping work related data out of your palm pilot. Resources - essentially the same thing as My Contacts but for internal company contacts such as your fellow consultants - again, useful for keeping work related data out of your palm pilot. Finally there's the Opportunities - which displays information relating to sales and forecasting opportunities for a given company (not something we use in project management).

Task Reporting
The most useful of the tools from a management perspective is task reporting and there are two two utilities built into the Offline Browser to support the gathering of the necessary information. First is the Task List which allows the consultant to report on tasks assigned. The consultant can modify the hours remaining on a task either by project percentage or in hours. Additionally, the consultant can change the forecasted start or finish. Finally, the consultant can freely add critical comments about the task.

The second Task Reporting tool is the Time Sheet for time reporting against a project. The program works fairly smoothly in allowing the consultant to pick the project, assign the time, and apply a description of the services rendered. My only complaint is there may be a bug / system process issue when applying time and then reporting the project status as complete. My testing shows that the hours roll over in the time reporting at the task level but not at the project level which to me is a bug. I'll confirm with the Changepoint folks.

Expense Reporting
The most useful tool from a consultant's perspective - gotta get paid! The Expenses tool allows the consultant to add their expenses against the project. Works in the exact same fashion as the online version of the Changepoint software.

Historical Review
This Saved Reports tool is an oxymoron - it can be the most interesting, the worst feature, the best feature - all depending upon your perspective and if the data is or isn't there. When utilizing Changepoint live and on-line the consultant will see a new icon light up - it's the picture of the floppy disk (like anyone actually uses floppy disks!) with down arrow. At this point a "picture" of the current html data can be taken and downloaded into a repository that will transfer into the Offline Browser's Saved Reports. Note that this is not always a saved report but can be an activity or a tree view. The pros - the data is there to review when offline. The cons - a very limited number html screens can be saved and the data is static - it can't be updated in the Offline Browser. My biggest frusturation is why the limited number of screen captures - as the entire product is an html page - why can't the user select any data to download as a couple of key pieces of info important to the consultants in the way we work would not be available.

I'll be performing some additional tests and working from the Offline Browser as much as possible over the next week and then introduce it to the consultant team the following week. There's enough positive benefits that the Offline Browser should become a productive tool.

Getting the Offline Browser Working...

One of the more interesting functions of Changepoint which we are not utilizing is the ability to take the data offline and synchronize the data once an internet connection is established.

To that end I'm testing the offline capabilities using a newly configured (ie - blanked out to the standards of our IT department) Dell laptop as my testbed. This ensures that no other prior configurations or setting get in the way.

Setting up the configurations for the offline browser is a snap. In the Administration of User Setup there is a Security Access tab with a window to Features. Within the feature set of Mobility are two settings that need to be checked. The first is Offline Browser Synchronization and the second is Save Offline Items.

The first challenge is to get the offline browser to install. Sounds easy, but Windows service pack 2 has made life difficult (for good reasons). My first attempt was thwarted by security settings as I received a warning blocking IE from downloading the necessary CAB files.

The solution is faily easy. Open up the IE options and assign the Changepoint software into your Trusted sites (make sure the https:// setting is unchecked first.

The second time around I received a dialog box complaining that what I'm doing isn't secure, but I received the install or don't install options. This time I installed the software. Once installed, the next dialog box asks for synchronization and I selected yes.

Now for the test, I turned off the laptops network card and from the start button selected the Changepoint Offline Browser and success...