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How does your organization measure success for your onboarding, implementation, or installation? There are many different ways to think about this question.

Do you know what to measure? Have you defined what it means for your customers to be successful and the internal teams that support the customer? 

Do you have that data available to you? Is that data measured today or do you need to create a place to document that information? 

How frequently do you need to measure? Based on what you are measuring how often do you need to see this to successfully measure?  

These are all loaded questions because there is so much behind each of them. And the answers will depend on your business, but in this post I will share how we manage our onboarding program using Salesforce and TaskRay.

Step 1: Define Goals

A few examples of how I define goals for our customers:  

  • 50% Attach rate of projects to new business
  • 90% Projects to be completed on-time and on-budget.
  • 70% Billable utilization for each member of the onboarding team. 
  • 10% Increase in retention from customers who go through our program vs self-serve
  • 17% Increased expansion from customers who go through our program vs self-serve
  • 90% Customer satisfaction score for the project

Step 2: Define Personas

Once goals are defined, I then define the different personas that need to see the success metrics and what level of data is important to them. At a high level, the roles are usually:

  1. Executive Team
  2. Managers
  3. Individual Contributors
  4. Customers 

Step 3: Define Metrics

Once I have my personas I write down what is important to each team and then I decide how I will get these metrics to them. Be specific in what you think is important and be clear on what data to include and what not to include.  

To provide an example, this post will focus on the Executive Team and Management Team personas and how we deliver success metrics for our TaskRay Onboarding Program. 

Executive Team

Executives generally only want to know if we are meeting the goals / objectives or not. They want to reach the objectives quickly with little effort.  

Dashboards

Dashboards are the best way to put all these reports together in one place.  Dashboards are not limited to one type of data. Instead, they are a place to view many reports on any data in Salesforce. The view is controlled with common filters and custom visualizations.  

NOTE: If you expect users who do not have a TaskRay license to use the dashboard set the ‘View As’ someone with a license. Then the user can refresh and see the data, but will not be able to drill into the reports.  

Management Team

Managers not only need to know if the team is hitting the success metrics, but they also need to manage the team’s workload, understand capacity, find out why projects are not completing on-time and on-budget, what projects are at risk, and the list goes on and on.  

Portfolio

Portfolio is one of my favorite views to use.  By creating a few custom filters and adding some custom columns I can group projects and quickly see projects that meet those requirements.  Some examples of how I use this are: 

  • 1:1s with my team: We can go through their projects, identify which one might be late, and talk strategy on how to mitigate risks.  
  • On-Hold: Quickly see a list of On-Hold Projects – Who is paused? 
  • Projects by Status: Filter based on project status.  What customers do I need to be worried about? Who is at risk?
  • Projects by Template Source: How are similar templates performing?

TaskRay Portfolio View (screen shot)

NOTE:  This view isn’t down to the task level, but rather task group, which is perfect for a quick overview.  Another fun fact…you can export the views!  

Insights

Insights view pairs nicely with Performance view. If I am in a 1:1 or looking at a segment of data in Portfolio view and need to understand more details like overall project health, milestone status, tasks at risk, and assigned to team members, Insight view is a quick way to get granular data.  The other cool thing is you can select one or many and have it rollup on the Insights Tab.  

TaskRay Insights View (screen shot)

NOTE:  Insights is also available from any All Work Views. Insights can be exported too! Check out the Charts tab within Insights as well.. This tab is not available in the Starter Edition.

Reports /Dashboards

I create a bunch of different Reports to help manage the day-to-day of the onboarding specialists and then Dashboards to consolidate the reports so I only need to go to a few locations to see what I need to see. 

Here is a list of Reports I use:

  • End Date: Tasks Overdue
  • End Date:  Projects Overdue
  • Open Projects 
  • Milestones completed
  • Blocked Tasks
  • On-Hold Projects 

There are two ways I suggest using these:

Individual Dashboard: Create reports with the filters for the reports as ‘my tasks’ or ‘my projects’ and then set up a Dashboard to have dynamic “View As” so you can switch to view by team members.

Team Dashboard: Create reports with the filter of ‘all projects’ or ‘all tasks’ on a different dashboard to allow you to see across team members. I have several dashboards: 

  • Executive Dashboard: I use this dashboard to report to our leadership team.
  • Project / Task Dashboard: I use this dashboard to manage the details and understand overall projects.
  • Capacity and Utilization: We use Flux Capacity and there are two dashboards, one for forecast and another for actuals. 

TaskRay Dashboard (screen shot)

NOTE:  TaskRay comes with pre-made reports. We recommend making a copy of these reports and then using that data as a launch point for adding in your own customizations. You can set up your reports to be emailed on a regular cadence as well if you prefer to view from your inbox.  

Template Performance

I like to look at Template Performance quarterly and annually to get a better feel on how the templates are performing.  Overall, it allows us to see data on the template and give us ideas for where to make changes.  The template is what sets the tone for the project timeline and the more accurate the template the better team performance is, which allows us to set better customers expectations.  I do not change the template until I understand the why behind the data. Check out this blog post for more information on revising your onboarding program. 

TaskRay Template Performance (screen shot)


 

One of the greatest benefits of TaskRay is being able to report on our Onboarding Program across customers, templates, and different subsets of data using Salesforce and TaskRay’s powerful reporting tools.  Hopefully this post will inspire you to look into how you can use reporting to improve your onboarding program.