You and your team have been working through projects in TaskRay, and it all seems to be going well. But… how do you know it’s actually going well? Like, quantifiably well? What are you doing currently to measure the success of your projects, if anything at all? Whether you are regularly tracking performance, or haven’t gotten that far, you’ve come to the right place! I’ll be sharing some tips and tricks of how TaskRay’s reporting features give you the tools necessary to ensure your projects are hitting all of the metrics of success aligned with your business goals.
Let’s start with features that are available in all TaskRay editions. First up, Salesforce reporting. TaskRay is native to Salesforce, which means at the end of the day, TaskRay is just a bunch of records in your Org. Like any other object/record in your Org, you can utilize Salesforce reports and dashboards to report on your project data. TaskRay comes with many pre-built reports that can be a great starting point on your journey to measure success. Even if you already have reports built out, I’d recommend taking a look at the ones included in the package just in case it gives you new ideas. Here is a short gif showing how to get started with our reports. Additionally, if you like to use dashboards to help visualize data outside of a report, TaskRay has a separate AppExchange package that you can download and access a set of pre-built dashboards.
Ok, reports are great, but I know you’re asking, how else can TaskRay help me see my metrics? We’ve got you covered. We have Lightning Components, which are great additions to your org. Lightning components make it easy to surface TaskRay data outside of the app, allowing you to reference vital project metrics in different places in your Salesforce org.
Additionally, TaskRay has a built-in feature that calculates an onboarding score. This can be a powerful metric, as long as you collect all of the key information that is necessary to derive the score. If you collect internal sentiment from your project manager and external feedback from your client, you are already on your way to measuring this metric. The only other thing we add to this calculation is an on-time completion of work, with deductions incorporated if the project took longer than the initial planned project schedule. Adding the onboarding score as well as the supporting metrics to your reports/analytics can provide the additional information needed to know if you are successful and where you can improve.
Now that we’ve covered the features available on all TaskRay editions, I am going to switch gears to review the additional functionality available on the Standard and Premium editions. These additional features can be used to measure the performance of not only your in-flight projects, but also to understand whether your templates are accurate based on historical project data.
Let’s look at the Performance Tab, which contains two views: Portfolio view and Template Performance. The Portfolio view is great for Project Managers as it allows you to see high-level project information without wading through all of the Task details that are present in the other views. Out of the box, this view shows you the project name, start date, end date, progress, and whether the project is complete. You can further customize this view to include additional information if you would like to report on other metrics. If you are looking for additional, summarized insights such as percent complete, tasks in each status, or milestone schedules and completion, definitely take a look at the Insights Tab, which can be found in the right sidebar throughout the TaskRay app.
The next feature that I will review is the Template Performance view. To get the most out of this view, I recommend you start to use it after you have worked in TaskRay for three to six months and if you use templates to create and stitch together projects. We say to wait a little while because the view shows you metrics about your inflight projects that were either cloned and/or stitched from a template. If you start using this view right away, you won’t see much, and not enough to make decisions, like if templates need to be updated. And let’s be honest, you didn’t do all of this work to get TaskRay up and running just to change it all again a few weeks later.
The reason this will be most helpful after some time has passed is because it measures the average amount of days and hours (if utilizing time tracking) it takes to complete projects created from a template. The view will aggregate project data and compare it to what was originally set in the template. Using this information, the Template Performance view will also provide insight into the specific tasks that often get stalled or completed ahead of planned schedule, allowing you to make informed adjustments to the template, if needed.
For example, let’s say that you have a template that, if all goes according to plan, should take 45 days and 30 hours to complete. After completing several projects from that template, you pull up that template in the Template Performance view and you find that, on average, the projects that have been cloned from that template are actually taking 48 days and 32 hours to complete. Using these insights, you can dive deeper into that template to see what is causing the delays of 3 days and 2 hours, then optimize the template to address the identified discrepancies.
Measuring performance isn’t always easy, but as you can see from all of our reporting capabilities, TaskRay is here to help you. Whether you are using Salesforce tools, like reporting and dashboards, or TaskRay-built reporting tools, like the Performance Tab and Project Insights, you should know that just by putting thought to this subject, you are already on your way to optimizing project performance for successful customer onboardings.
Stay tuned – we’ll have more tips and tricks coming your way soon!
