Best Practices for Ongoing (non-project) Work?

I'm looking for feedback from Clarizen employees plus other users.

We are evaluating Clarizen and if we proceed with it would very much like to use it to manage ALL of our work (within reason). We don't want employees tracking project work in one application and non-project work in another. In our current software application we have "service boards" set up for tracking general non-project work against areas/categories of ongoing work (no start and end) such as "Accounting", "IT", etc. totaling about 15 categories in all.

My thoughts so far for options are:

Topics or more likely User Groups look like they might be a way of assigning categories (i.e. make a user group "Accounting"), but unfortunately they don't allow tasks and subtasks, which I find extremely useful for all work. I also don't see any way when selecting a user group to only show active tasks in the side panels? I don't want the side panels filling up with hundreds of tasks (not sure how side panels behave once they contain hundreds of items but when they contain only a few they they seem to show all tasks including completed).
Just create ongoing projects for each Category. Or even one big single ongoing project with sub-projects for each category. This allows tasks and subtasks, and good filtering of (only active) tasks in views, but I don't necessarily like the idea of using projects for ongoing work that does not have a start and end.

I should note that one requirement is to be able to determine which users see which categories, everyone for instance should not be able to see "Accounting", in case that affects recommendations.

Again, I'm very interested in what others are doing and why.

Thanks

Project_Manager December 31, 2014 03:04 Answered

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Hello,

For tasks, you can only assign resources to it. However, you can actually add user groups to the tasks so they can follow the task. However, they will not be able to report time and such since they are not a resource of the task. You can actually just filter for only active tasks to be shown. To do this, you would need to go to the user group and on the right side (if you added groups to the task mentioned earlier), and expand that window. Then, you would only need to filter for active tasks. Please see my screenshot.
Let me get back to you regarding this as I will need to consult with my fellow colleagues on how they are achieving this.

Tom Do January 02, 2015 23:26 0 votes

Thanks Tom. Let me clarify, when I say "User Groups", what I mean is I want a way to categorize work, a place to go to look at:

Accounting
Branding
Marketing
Etc.

And then by clicking on the category see work related to it. I am thinking we could create some user groups for that purpose and just give those groups a prefix and teach everyone that those groups are used to track ongoing categories of work.

I realize I'd still need to assign those tasks to resources, the user group would just be a category container.

Project_Manager January 03, 2015 04:56 0 votes

No problem,

I am asking for some feedback regarding best practices. I will update you as soon as possible.

Tom Do January 06, 2015 00:00 0 votes

Thanks! What I am testing right now is I created some Topics. Screenshot attached. I'm thinking this may give us a good way to attach non project work to an area of work. Just assign a to-do and attach it to a topic.

Project_Manager January 06, 2015 00:50 0 votes

p.s. I just gave all the topics a prefix of 0 so as to separate them from ad hoc topics that everyone might create.

Project_Manager January 06, 2015 00:51 0 votes

5 years later.........We currently report our time to Finance, we are the IT department, and everyone needs a total of 40 hours a week reported, even non-project work. We achieved this by creating general line items such as "Training & Onboarding" "Time off" "sustain" as projects. Of course then, you have to filter them out of reports and such and the tracking is always 'At risk' since we dont bother updating the dates because there really arent any but this was the only way we could figure out how to do exactly what you stated.

Emily Triyonis January 16, 2019 22:48 2 votes

Best Practices for Ongoing (non-project) Work?

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6 comments
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