Once you have created your plan, you are ready to start pinning your tickets to track commitments and variance reasons.
After you and the project team have planned and scheduled the work for the upcoming week, you will want to keep track of how well everyone is completing their tasks throughout the week. To track the status of your tickets you will want to pin them down in the plan.
To pin the upcoming week’s worth of work, move the blue-shaded area called the Next Period to include the upcoming seven days (use the white arrows to click and drag this area on the timeline to adjust). In your weekly meeting, make sure that all the tickets in the upcoming seven days are scheduled where they should be. Click Promise Now at the top of the Next Period, and the Next Period will be shifted out a week.
The green-shaded Current Period will appear and will highlight the upcoming week’s worth of work. All tickets in the Current Period will have a black pin placed in them and users will have to update the tickets throughout the week as complete on time, early, or late.
Tip: Pin work at the end of each weekly meeting to ensure that work is being pinned on the same day week after week.
Arguably the most crucial part of pinning tasks is the follow-up work of updating the statuses of that pinned work. Users have four update options:
- Completed as Planned/On-Time: marked with a green pin
- Early: marked with a blue pin
- Late: marked with a red pin
- Reschedule/replan: marked with a red pin
If a task was completed on time, right-click on the task, select Complete as planned, and the pin will turn green.
If a task was completed late or early, right-click on the task, select Complete with changes, and select the actual start date, end date, and provide a variance reason. Users will need to record a variance reason in order to save the changes to the ticket but variance reasons allow you to tell your side of the story and explain why work was not completed on time. Click Done and Save.
If a task has not been started and needs to be rescheduled, click on the ticket and drag it to the new planned start and end date. Then add a variance reason to explain why the work needs to be replanned and select Done.
Tip: Have Basic Users update their tasks before the weekly meeting will save your team time in those meetings. You’ll only have to talk about the work that wasn’t completed on time.