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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INBOX TIP!
The one thing both of these structures have in common is an Build a process to alert you anytime a new
request come into the Inbox.
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.

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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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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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 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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 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 TIP!
sample for what it might contain, right). If you don’t have a project for
each release, you can use a
For each release in your project structure, clone this template
single task with your release
to create your repeated tasks that will stay waiting in the management tasks in a
holding column until your request features are complete. 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

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.

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.

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