Continuing a series of six posts on a project, began in 2008, by the Blackbaud User Education team. See previous post (part 5 of 6).
By: Ellyn Hassell and Lindsey Rix
Today, the client contact work item has become a solid part of our team’s daily workflow. As with anything new, it took some time to incorporate it, but it’s proven to be a stable, user-friendly tool that fits our need for tracking client contact. We’ve successfully established best practices for how we create, maintain, and report on the contact we have with clients, which is exactly what we envisioned when we started this project!
Check out the new things we’re doing with this tool and the tweaks we’ve made for improvement.
Batch import survey information into TFS
In earlier posts, we mentioned the different ways we interact with clients. One of the most popular avenues for contact is through our help resources survey. On average, we receive 92 responses per quarter. That’s a lot of good information we want to track!
How do we get this information into TFS without having to spend time creating one work item at a time? We use both Excel and TFS to create a workflow for importing survey data…batch style!
First, we create a query In TFS that includes all filters (fields) from the client contact work item. The key aspect is that for all the data you want to enter in Excel, you must add these fields as selected columns in TFS. When you display the fields as columns, the columns are created for you to enter data in Excel. Once you save your query in TFS, you can then create a new list and connect to your query in Excel. We still have to manually copy over the data from the survey export, but it doesn’t require much more than a little time to copy, paste, and save the data back to TFS. Once we established this workflow, we were able to start analyzing and creating reports in TFS. Our favorite aspect is the ability to review our total client contact, including the survey. We like to see all feedback we receive from our users, and really enjoy looking for ways to improve content based on trends and suggestions!
(Speaking of our survey, if you’re interested in telling us what you think about our help resources, take this five-minute survey. For your generosity with your time and input, we enter you into our quarterly drawing for a $25 Amazon gift certificate! Best part? You can choose to give your feedback anonymously or provide your contact information in case we want to follow-up with you regarding your responses. We love to hear from you!)
Fine-tuning our work item
Since we consistently receive feedback from colleagues (those in Support and other internal departments here at Blackbaud) as well as feedback from clients, we decided to tweak the work item to track ALL feedback. This required changes to the form, most importantly the Iteration field. Since we use this field to specify the contact type, we needed to reorganize the structure of the available choices to account for internal contact types.
We made our changes, re-imported the work item to its live environment within TFS, and were good to go! One great thing to note is that all existing work items automatically updated to reflect the structure change in the Iteration field while retaining the field’s original value.
During this time, we also gained administrative rights for TFS, so that made our editing process much easier!
A second TFS work item? Yes!
Not long ago, our team was faced with another, somewhat different, need to track information. This time, we needed to track efforts for adding and editing topics within MadCap Flare (the primary tool we use to author documentation content).
We leveraged the existing client contact work item to create a new one – the Topic work item. We renamed most of the fields on the existing form, added new options, and created new fields and customized queries. For this form, we kept the Iteration field since we needed the ability to categorize. We learned that the values in the Iteration field are shared within a team project. This meant our writers would see all options available in the Iteration field no matter which work item they accessed. To keep things as consistent and easy-to-use as possible, we went back and restructured the choices in this field to account for new categories. Needless to say, it was a smooth process and we were pleased to reuse TFS yet again to meet our needs.
Without a doubt, TFS was a wise choice for us. Let us know how you’ve made customizations in TFS or other tools to meet your needs.
