TASKRAY HELPS ADMINS SHINE We’ve all heard the old adage “wear multiple hats” to describe a job role, but it’s a rare job that truly

wears more hats than a Salesforce Admin. Salesforce Admins are asked to:

Map complex business processes to fully architected solutions

Field sales operation analysis

Perform marketing miracles with campaign execution

Create analytics to dazzle executives

Research and implement 3rd party apps

Onboard and train new users

Monitor and increase adoption

And, oh yeah, reset passwords!

The Salesforce Admin’s unique capability to absorb operational business processes across the

corporate hierarchy and translate them to an efficient process to collect, share, and report on data is a

feat of strength. Any #awesomeadmin knows buried in their success is their ability to manage and

prioritize a workload that flows across departments and comes from every direction.

While admin responsibilities vary from company to company, we know

there is one need that does not change and that is the need to organize

and prioritize the requests funneling to the admin. We’ve put together a

sample business process for managing, prioritizing and collaborating on

Salesforce Requests using TaskRay. Whether this process will work

perfectly for your team or it just gives you some ideas of how to customize for your needs, we hope

this helps you understand the power of TaskRay for admins.

TaskRay is 100% Salesforce Native TaskRay, the modern project management application for Salesforce, is designed to help you and

your team be more productive, efficient, and collaborative. A 100% native Salesforce application,

TaskRay enables you to manage, track, and support your work in any area of your business.

While we often see TaskRay implementations to manage customer onboarding, fulfillment, and

success, we don’t want to overlook the needs of the Salesforce Admin, every company’s #1 user and

the one often wearing more hats than imaginable.

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Getting Started 1. Install TaskRay from the AppExchange

2. Each member of your team will need a TaskRay license and permission set

3. Use the TaskRay training modules and guides to get them oriented to TaskRay’s basic concepts,

functionality and capability. For admins, we especially recommend:

Installation & Customization Guide

Getting Started Workshop

User Guide

Best Practices Training

Configure TaskRay for Your Process Step 1. Create Your Project Structure

Salesforce administration comes in many different shapes and sizes. From part-time admins in small

orgs (you know the brave people that were hired for a different role and suddenly inherited

Salesforce) to solo admins in medium orgs to the largest enterprises that may have a large Salesforce

admin and development team.

Depending on the scale of your Salesforce implementation your

request & change management process may vary dramatically and

with that so might your project structure. We’ll talk more about

change management later, but here are some ideas to get you

started.

FEATURE-FOCUSED

For smaller orgs, it may may make sense to manage a departmental,

or feature focused, management of Salesforce requests (see sample

feature-focused project structure, top left).

TIME-BASED

For orgs with large Salesforce teams, you are likely managing

sandboxes, change sets, and release cycles. We invite you to look at

our product development use case for more details on managing

Agile Product Development inside of TaskRay. For a release-based

request process it may make sense to manage your projects

mirrored to time-based releases (see sample time-based project

structure, bottom left).

Whether you are solo or a large team either of these structures can

work well, pick the one or create your own that makes the most

sense for your organization.

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Step 2. Determine Information to Collect & Track

As your requests come in you will likely need a few custom fields to help you organize the requests.

Many of the default TaskRay fields should work well to capture request data. Any additional fields can

be created on the TaskRay Task object. Don’t forget to add your custom fields to the TaskRay Task

Field Set which control the detail page in TaskRay. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Requestor: Email address or user lookup field

Request Type: E.g. Email Template Creation, Report Modification

Date Needed: Use default TaskRay Deadline field

Priority: Use default TaskRay Priority field

Salesforce Request Record Type: This is an optional step if you want to collect different fields

or have different statuses for your Salesforce requests. If you do not need different statuses,

then consider adding a Type field (in lieu of Record Type set-up & maintenance) to house this

information so you have an attribute to filter your reports on.

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INBOX

The one thing both of these structures have in common is an

Inbox. The Inbox project is where inbound Salesforce requests

are routed while they wait for consideration by the Admin.

Inbox requests can be dispositioned into a release, organized

into a feature-focused project, or hang out in the Inbox while

you collect more requirement details from the requestor.

TIP! Build a process to alert you anytime a new

request come into the Inbox.

Step 3. Get Control of Inbound Requests

Now that your TaskRay project structure & fields are ready to go, it’s time to get control of those

inbound requests. There are a variety of ways you can collect Salesforce requests - in fact you

probably already receive them through email, Chatter posts, phone calls, cubicle drop-ins — you name it. So many requestors and channels cannot only be overwhelming, but it can be distracting

to the actual work at hand.

First priority is to funnel all the requests to a central location so you can address them in the time you

have dedicated each week to evaluate. But first let’s address how you get the requests to your Inbox

project. There are several options largely dependent on if your users are also TaskRay users, and also

if your users are Salesforce users. There are many ways to skin the cat, but here are a few ideas to get

you started:

CHATTER ACTION

A global “Salesforce Request” action works great if all of your Salesforce users are also TaskRay users.

It’s a quick and easy to set-up a global Chatter action that your users can use to submit a new

Salesforce request. Since you can not set a predefined lookup value in Chatter Actions, you will also

want to create a workflow that will route the requests to the Inbox project upon create.

EMAIL TO TASK

OK, maybe not all of your Salesforce users have licenses to TaskRay and as much as you would like to

reduce email it’s where your users still live. Why not make it easy for them to submit their Salesforce

requests to TaskRay straight from their email? It keeps your email inbox lean, and creates tasks

directly to your TaskRay Inbox. Here’s an article on how to setup Email to Task for your organization.

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Step 4. Work the Requests

Now that your Inbox is running you are likely flooded with requests. Here are a few rules of thumb in

managing your requests.

1. Confirm: Give the requester confirmation that you received the ticket. A workflow or process

works great here!

2. Evaluate: Can you finish this task in less than 30 minutes? Get it scheduled and done. The

quick wins feel good for you and your team.

3. Clarify: Is the request unclear? Use Chatter to gather more information from your requestor.

Don’t forget to @mention them!

4. Define: Is this a request with several sub-tasks? Create a checklist. Checklist help you keep a

manageable number of meaningful milestones on the board while still preserving specific to-

dos and details within. Or is your request bigger than a breadbox? Consider breaking it out into

its own project with classic project management tasks such as identifying stakeholders,

requirements gathering, research AppExchange solutions, etc.

5. Prioritize: Reassign the request to the correct project and update the status. TaskRay defaults

to Holding, Prioritized, Started, & Finished where Holding are requests under consideration

whereas Prioritized mean the request is approved and waiting for its turn at the top of the list.

If you run your process differently consider creating a record type with new statuses to

manage your Salesforce requests. (E.g. Backlog, Request Approved, Started, Sandbox

Complete, Released.)

6. Block: Did something happen to create a roadblock? Mark the task blocked and consider

creating a workflow rule to email a status change to the requester.

7. Complete: Finally, move the tasks through the Kanban board as you begin to work on them

and ultimately mark them complete.

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WEB FORM

A web form works great on an intranet, or on a site that is

accessible to your users. If you handle more than just

Salesforce, e.g. IT requests, you may be fielding requests from

users that do not have access to Salesforce. If that’s the case,

or if you want to conveniently include a form on an internal

portal, then a web form is a great solution. Take a look at this

quick form we created through our partnership with Form

Assembly. Want to know more? Click here

TIP! If you are more than a team of one, we suggest auto-assigning all of your

requests to a queue as they hit your Inbox. This more accurately reflects

ownership until you or one of your teammates grabs the request and assigns it.

Step 5. Communication & Change Management

Like many software rollouts, changes you make in Salesforce can be

small or impactful. One way to get your users on board with change

by forming regular release cycles so users can expect change in a

regular and welcome tempo.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY

With workflow and process builder, it is easy to set-up a workflow so

that the requestor can see the status of their request change as it

moves through your process.

For the rest of the team that might require training, or notes on usage,

a release checklist to manage your roll-outs and user adoption

process works wonders. Here’s how that might work in TaskRay.

Set-up a Release Checklist project to use as your template.

Include any tasks required for every Salesforce release cycle.

Include your user-facing change management tasks (see

sample for what it might contain, right).

For each release in your project structure, clone this template

to create your repeated tasks that will stay waiting in the

holding column until your request features are complete.

TIP! If you don’t have a project for

each release, you can use a

single task with your release

management tasks in a

checklist. Checklists clone too!

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Working Requests in TaskRay TaskRay offers three powerful lenses by which to view your Admin projects and requests: Kanban,

Deadline, and Plan View.

Kanban View

TaskRay’s distinctive Kanban board visually displays your individual and team workload-think of it as a

whiteboard with sticky notes on it. Out of the box Kanban comes with four columns: Holding,

Prioritized, Started, Finished. However, you can customize those as needed for your work process.

Kanban can even support visualizing different work processes by using record types. This is ideal if

you have multiple teams using TaskRay within your Salesforce instance.

Deadline View

Want an immediate view about which tasks are overdue, coming up, or unscheduled? Use Deadline

View to manage projects and tasks chronologically. You can even quickly mark tasks complete with a

single click from this view. Very useful for daily task management or weekly planning meetings.

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Plan View

Want to see your projects, tasks, and team assignments on a timeline calendar? Use Plan View to get

a view of your projects over time. It allows you to schedule projects and tasks using drag and drop

assignment. This view is very useful for longer term planning meetings such as quarterly and yearly

reviews.

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Highlight Your Work By all means, report on your work. Highlighting your performance will not only help you fill in the

inevitable annual review form, but it will also help you get the team and resources you need, all with

some simple visibility and transparency into your process. Here are some sample metrics to create in

a TaskRay dashboard:

Salesforce Requests Created by Month

Completed by Requestor Department

Completed

# of Requests by Department and Priority

Requests by Status

Aged requests

Contact Us Have questions about how TaskRay could work for your team? Contact us today. We are happy to

help. We believe that customer support is just as important as powerful, flexible, easy-to-use tools.

But don’t take our word for it, check out the over 100 5-star customer reviews.

TASKRAY = RESULTS

✓ GET CONTROL OF YOUR INBOX Reduce multiple inbound sources to single channel.

✓ MORE EFFICIENT COMMUNICATION Status alerts, communication threads and transparency eliminate the dreaded blackhole syndrome.

✓ INCREASED VISIBILITY Getting you the resources you need.

✓ USER BUY-IN A regular release cycle cadence does wonders for adoption.

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