Simplifying the workflow of team management: interactive calendar within Salesforce

Our client had a team of personnel who were placed in various locations across the country and were working various shifts. The coordination of these personnel and allocation of tasks to them were happened through manual processes using WhatsApp and Phone calls. As the team grew, so did the burden of coordination on the admin and managerial team members leading to employee burnouts. The management had the option of hiring more people as a short term fix or deploy technology to streamline the processes.

We understood that the situation demanded immediate intervention to relieve the pain points of the coordination team. Lots of comfort were derived from habitual ways of working; however, since everyone was at a breaking point, the team was eager to have a technology solution that will save them time and effort and also prevent mistakes from happening. Through our consulting process involving de-risking, we narrowed the findings to simple actions: implement a tool that will give central visibility of personnel availability from shift-to-shift, bulk upload shifts and holidays and provide simple ways to manage the day-to-day operations.

We assessed a few options and zoned in on isimio calendar, a 3rd party Salesforce AppExchange app that provided basic calendar functionalities needed but most importantly, provided the ability to customize the solution to fit the need of the client.

Image 1: High-level Calendar view to manage multiple personnel in one place

We implemented the solution in an agile manner, ensuring that the team who will be adopting the solution were comfortable and were taken along in the journey every step of the way. After every sprint or some time two sprints, we would demo the work-in-progress build and gather feedback from the client management and the admin team. This prevented any shock or surprise the team may have faced and also made them feel invested in the solution, thus making it their achievement rather than something handed top-down.

Technically, the implementation involved onboarding the 3rd party app into client’s Salesforce org, creating flows between the custom app objects and the client org objects to ensure the right trigger actions are achieved, creating custom alerts and notifications, implementing validations to ensure the required restrictions are effected (e.g. prohibit a personnel on holiday to be assigned a task) and customising the views to suit the use cases of the client user.

Image 2: Customisation on Calendar to embed into the client org’s workflow

Once deployed into production, we bulk-uploaded shifts data and the personnel information and assisted the client admin users to adopt the solution. The adoption was challenging and involved implementing some change requests for the users. As with many solutions, the adoption throws up it’s own, sometimes unforeseen challenges. However, since we work in an agile fashion, we were able to consider and implement these change requests immediately to tap into the momentum the release had created. Thus, with the teething troubles ironed out, the client admin team began using the solution in earnest.

Image 3: Multiple types of tasks in one view showing utilisation

The interactive, drag-and-drop real time calendar functionality within Salesforce immediately freed up more than 50% of the admin team’s time. No longer had they the need to use WhatApp to get to know what task the team personnel were working on. They could now do this by simply looking at the system. The solution also helped them drastically cut down on errors since the system restricted them from mis-allocating resources to tasks. The team uses the interactive calendar functionality every day to manage task allocations to team’s personnel.