When we work in Salesforce, we have the advantage of being able to communicate across the enterprise using the activities tools. Now, we have already covered the process of creating activities, but as we can see from our example, we don’t have a lot of visibility.

But you might be saying to yourself right now “But I saw all my tasks and events, thats pretty visible, isn’t it?”.

You would be right about that, it is pretty visible to you, but what about this scenario. Lets say we have used the activity creation tools to create a task for another one of our team members. How do we know its complete? Heck, how do we even remember that we created the task in the first place. Well, this series of articles is going to cover this in some detail. Get your propeller hats out, because we are going to dive in to some advanced tips and tricks below the fold!

Ok, your still here. Now, lets not be nervous, only some of this is going to be difficult, and we are going to take it in nice easy steps. This article will cover the following.

  • Writing reports to find out the status of tasks that you have assigned to team members.
  • Writing manager level reports to look at the performance of our team with respect to tasks.
  • Creating dashboards to help visualize this information.
  • And finally, the desert, writing an S-Control that shows the status of all the tasks we have assigned and placing it on our Home Tab.

For the rest of this article, lets take a moment to discuss the reasons for these kind of reports, and the kinds of questions they answer.

Salesforce is not Outlook or Exchange, but it can emulate some of those features. As we occupy different roles within an organization, perform different support duties within that organization. Salespeople are going to be writing quotes, making appointments, doing research, etc. Inside support staff are going to be handling invoices, support calls, and much more. Managers are going to be watching the whole process and trying to keep it running smoothly.

One of the tools Salesforce gives us to help us do this are the tasks that we can create. We have already shown how we can create tasks and events for ourselves, but what we haven’t shown is that we can create tasks and events for other people in our organization.

Lets look at a scenario like this one. As an outside salesperson away from the office, we are interacting with a lot of customers and each of them is likely to generate action items for ourselves and our team. We can use Salesforce to help us do this. Sure, email and phone calls do the same thing, but I think that violates a basic rule that as an organization we need to be trying to follow.

  • Keep it Visible!

We need to keep this information visible to ourselves, to our bosses, to the rest of our team. We need to be able to relate it to our accounts, our opportunities, our leads. Visibility means being able to find information as it relates to any of these things and more.

So, now that I have sold you on using Tasks to communicate, lets take a moment to briefly consider what we want to know about these communications. I would argue that we would want to know at least the following things about the tasks we have assigned to ourselves and others:

  1. What is the Task.
  2. Who is the Task assigned to.
  3. When was it assigned.
  4. When is it due (if has a due date).
  5. Is it on time, or is it late.

Further more, if I am a manager, I would also like to know:

  1. How many task have been assigned within the team.
  2. How long is it taking for team members to complete tasks.
  3. Which team members have the latest tasks.

I am certain you are begining to see all sorts of possibilities, and can probably add to this simple list quite quickly. Please do so. Go ahead and add comments with your suggestions, and I will try and accomodate them in the rest of the article. Stay tuned for part 2!