Action plans
- Omolola Adeyemi (Unlicensed)
The ‘More’ tab along the top menu gives us the option to create and view action plans.
Action plans provide a method to detail a goal or objective to be achieved and outline tasks needed to reach the goal or objective. Assurance managers can use action plans to create and monitor progress on workflows, such as remediation plans for third parties, with action tasks that link to various parts of the system, such as Assessment Answers, Organisations and more.
Action Tasks can be assigned to any user in the system, allowing both internal and external collaboration and workflow tracking, with notifications when an action task is assigned, or when the status is updated. Action plans can be configured in an order with "prior tasks" being linked to later tasks, and these tasks can also be linked to other elements in the system, including other contacts, organisation, assessments, and even specific answers, or even all the above.
Creating an action plan
To add a new action plan, you have to click on the ‘Create Action Plan’ button on the left-hand side.
Name (the title of the action plan), Description (optional information regarding the plan) and Assignee (the owner of the plan) are the three fields available to fill and create an action plan. Name and Assignee are mandatory fields. In addition, there is an option to ‘show tasks only to assigned people’, this checkbox lets you decide if the tasks from the action plan should only be visible to the person the task is assigned to.
Once the Action Plan details have been entered, the plan can then be created by clicking the ‘Create’ button.
A message will appear in the action plan overview page once the action plan has been created successfully.
In the action plan overview page, it is possible to:
Create tasks within the action plan
Remind assignees
Completing an Action Plan
Edit action plan details
Cancel the action plan
Create tasks within the action plan
Action tasks are used to list the actions that are needed to complete the action plan. An action task can be created within the action plan by clicking the ‘Create Action Task’ button on the left-hand side.
At a minimum, the name and assignee of the action task should be entered. In addition, a due date for the action task can be assigned and the action task can be given either a high, medium, or low priority. Furthermore, the action task can be linked to prior tasks if action sequence is important. In addition, a free text description about the action task can be added as well as a linked object. A linked object is an object which links to the task and can either be an organisation, assessment, assessment answer or contact.
Once an action task has been created the added information is then displayed in the Action Task Details page.
As a manager, the action list on the left-hand side allows you to edit the task information, update the status, remind the assignees of work required and delete the task.
Remind assignees
Users that have been assigned to a task can be reminded to complete the task. The action to remind assignees can be found under the action menu on the left-hand side. Once clicked, this will alert the assignee via email to complete their task.
Completing an Action Plan
Once all the tasks in an action plan have the status ‘Done’ and the action plan has 100% overall completion, the action plan can be marked as completed and archived.
Edit action plan details
The details for an action plan are also editable. This can be achieved by clicking on the “edit details” action in the action menu. This would then lead to a page which will allow for action plan detail editing.
Cancel the action plan
Action plans can also be cancelled. When an action plan is cancelled all tasks that are not completed will change status to ON HOLD and the plan would then be archived. The “Cancel action plan” option can be found under the action’s menu on the left hand side.