How to use “Issue Types”
Today we are pleased to announce a new way to help project teams stay on top of issues that occur during their rollouts. Feedback from BigWave users exhibited there are typical issues tracked in a project and reported back to the end user. BigWave now formalizes this concept with the new Issue Types feature. Issue Types replace the old Issues implementation. We will discuss the old vs the new implementations later in this article, but first let’s examine a scenario for a project where Issue Types come in handy.
For a site in a rollout let’s assume you contractually must track each time:
- The store manager isn’t on site
- The tech arrived late to the site
You may now enter these specific items as “Issue Types”. In the project Setup area is a new Issue Types tab. Similar to adding other things in BigWave you simply click “Add Issue Type” to add more.
On the work order page, comments are categorized by Issue Types.
After the comment is added you may Resolve the issue by clicking the yellow Resolve icon…
When the issue is resolved a special “Resolving Issue” screen is displayed.
The resolution is displayed in the comment thread with information that links it back to the original issue.
Now that you see how easy it is to specify and track issues, let’s take a quick look at the reporting.
In the project Home area the old “Issues” link now divides into a “Summary” and “Detail” report.
Clicking “Summary” yields summarized information with a date period filter (Current week, Previous week, Custom date range, etc). The report shows Total Issues by Issue Type for the date period given. If an issue in the Total Issues column is resolved, that is reflected in the Total Resolved column.
NOTE: For legacy projects “Issue” comment types are now mapped to an “Unspecified Issue” and are reported as such. If you start a project without entering any standard issues to track, the “Unspecified Issue” is available by default. If the project has standard issues defined, then the “Unspecified Issue” default option is not made available. “Unspecified Issue” is only for legacy projects and for projects that don’t define specific Issue Types to track.
You may drill into the details section by hyper-linking from one of the listed Issue Types. For example, clicking “Tech arrived late” above would show the details for that item. I clicked the Resolved option. Because there is only one “Tech arrived late” issue, and it has been resolved, then I must filter on Resolved issues to see the work order information.
We will be incorporating this functionality into a new alert type for sending nightly progress reports to a list of people. The Issue Type summary/detail reports will be one of a few options that can be included on this report.
Keep the great feedback coming, and let us know how we may continue to supply the most relevant solution for monitoring and control of rollouts!
Written by John Livermore - Multi-site Project Management
Email This Post