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Chapter 8. Use Cases
- Table of Contents
- Personal To-Do List
- Bug Tracking
It is hard to imagine that any effective company, team, or individual gets by without activity management. Knowing what is left to be done (and quite often, knowing what has been done) constitutes vital information to move forward on an optimal path. Thanks to its careful design and virtually unlimited scalability openCRX delivers value to individuals, teams, and even globally distributed organizations with very complex tasks. In this chapter we will look at some use cases for openCRX activity management:
Personal To-Do List
A 'To-Do List' is a list of all the tasks that you need to carry out. It consolidates all the jobs that you have to do into one place. You can then prioritize these tasks into order of importance and/or urgency enabling you to spend time on those tasks that matter most. Working effectively is not only a matter of getting the right tasks on your To-Do List, it's the result of getting the right tasks done in the right order.
To-Do Lists are essential when you need to carry out a number of different tasks or different sorts of task, or when you have made a number of commitments. If you find that you are often caught out because you have forgotten to do something, then you need to keep a To-Do List.
Whilst To-Do Lists are very simple, they are also extremely powerful, both as a method of organizing yourself and as a way of reducing stress. Often problems may seem overwhelming or you may have a seemingly huge number of demands on your time. This may leave you feeling out of control, and overburdened with work.
The solution is often simple: Write down the tasks that face you, and if they are large, break them down into their component elements. If these still seem large, break them down again. Do this until you have listed everything that you have to do. Once you have done this, run through these jobs allocating priorities from low to immediate. If too many tasks have a high priority, run through the list again and demote the less important ones. Also keep an eye on due dates and try to estimate the effort it takes to complete an activity. Managing time is just as important as managing importance if you want to succeed.
The following chart tells the obvious, once you start thinking about it:
It is smart to spend your time on those tasks that are urgent and important. Next you work yourself through those tasks that are either urgent or important (this can take some juggling, trading off deadlines vs. high importance items), but try not to spend time on stuff that is neither urgent nor important (even though it may be fun to do so.).
As long as you are dealing with a small number of activities you can easily manage your To-Do List on a piece of paper. But even with a handful of activities to manage, a well structured To-Do List yields a precise plan that you can use to eliminate the problems you face. You will be able to tackle these in order of importance and urgency. This allows you to separate important and urgent jobs from the many time-consuming trivial ones.
Different people use To-Do Lists in different ways in different situations: if you are in a sales-type role, a good way of motivating yourself is to keep your list relatively short and aim to complete it every day.
In an operational role, or if tasks are large or dependent on too many other people, then it may be better to keep one big list and 'chip away' at it. It may be that you carry unimportant jobs from one To-Do List to the next. You may not be able to complete some very low priority jobs for several months. Only worry about this if you need to - if you are running up against a deadline for them, they will show up on your radar screen in the urgent box, even if they remain low priority (obviously, at some point before they are due you need to raise their priorities.).
If you have not used To-Do Lists before, try them now, as they are one of the keys to being really productive and efficient.
Managing a To-Do List with openCRX
Create a new Activity Tracker by clicking on Activity Management > Activity Trackers > Activity Tracker. Give your tracker a name, add a description, and then click the button [Save]:
Next you should edit the newly created tracker and change access levels for Browse, Update, and Delete to [1] Private (these settings can be found in the tab [System]) to prevent other people from tampering with your tracker. The last security measure you should take is to remove all owning groups from your tracker. Click on the grid tab [^] and remove all owning groups from your tracker by dragging the icon(s) to the add/remove box and then clicking the button [-] (repeat this procedure for each owning group if there are multiple owning groups):
Verify the security settings once again:
Owning User (tab [System]): you should be owning user of your To-Do Activity Tracker
Browse access level (tab [System]) should be set to [1] Private
Update access level (tab [System]) should be set to [1] Private
Delete access level (tab [System]) should be set to [1] Private
Owning Groups (Grid tab [^]): there should not be any owning groups
If the security settings of your Activity Tracker are correct, the operation New Activity will create activities with the appropriate security settings so that only you have access to the tracker and the linked activities.
Additional information about openCRX security is available in chapter Security (or in the openCRX Security Guide, if you really want to dive into the technical details of role-based security).
Now you can add new activities to this tracker by using the operation Actions > New Activity.
Choose an appropriate activity type and provide information in the other fields as appropriate. Click [OK] to save your new activity:
The result of the operation New Activity returns links that enable you to conveniently navigate to the newly created activity or continue with editing (see Activity for details on additional information you can provide).
Once you have created your activities you can navigate to the Activity Tracker To-Do and try some of the following:
Sort To-Do List by Scheduled Start
Move your mouse over the sort button to the left of the text Scheduled start in the grid Activities and click it. openCRX will present all the activities on your To-Do List sorted (ascending) by Scheduled start. If you want to narrow down your view to a particular day, click that day in the calendar below the navigation menu (this will copy the respective date to the search box - alternatively you can manually enter the date) and then click the text Scheduled start to filter for that particular date:
Sort To-Do List by Priority (descending)
Use the appropriate predefined filter to have openCRX sort all your open activities (open is equivalent to the value of %-complete not being 100) by descending priority; activities of equal priority are sorted by ascending due date:
Sort To-Do List by Due Date/Time (ascending)
Use the appropriate predefined filter to have openCRX sort all your open activities (open is equivalent to the value of %-complete not being 100) by ascending due date/time; activities with identical due date/time are sorted by descending priority:
