Who this book is for

The intended audience are HickoryCRM administrators and HickoryCRM users.

What do you need to understand this book

It helps if the reader is somewhat familiar with HickoryCRM even though this is not a requirement.

Activity Tracker

Activity Trackers are a powerful concept to add some structure to activities and people related to these activities, i.e. you can use them to group and categorize sets of activities , people related to these activities (we call them "participants") , work records , etc. For example, you could use an Activity Tracker to keep track of a product design project (i.e. all the project activities, milestones, project members, work records related to the project, etc.), a software development project (look at the use case Bug Tracking , a support contract with one of your customers, to manage your personal Personal To-Do List , etc.

In addition to activities and participants you can also attach categories, milestones, and work records to an Activity Tracker (all of these concepts are explained subsequently if you read on):

Anatomy of an Activity Tracker :

• Name of the Activity Tracker

• a short Description of the Activity Tracker

• Welcome usually contains detailed information about the Activity Tracker, typically provided by the manager of the Activity Tracker to the other participants; participants new to an Activity Tracker should always read the Welcome before they start doing any work related to the Activity Tracker; if appropriate, make use of the HTML feature to add explicit structure (you can start the HTML editor by clicking on the small icon [HTML] located just above the input field)

• hh (estimated effort) and mm (estimated effort) is information that is typically provided by the manager of the Activity Tracker - a guess on how many hours and minutes it takes to work through all the linked activities

• Max deviation in % contains the maximum (expected) deviation of the actual effort from the estimated effort in % of the estimated effort - high values indicate the manager's low confidence in the accuracy of the estimated effort numbers

• hh (actual effort) and mm (actual effort) are derived from the information contained in the linked work records; use the operation View > Calculate and Refresh. to update this information

• various Charts are provided that summarize/aggregate information contained in objects related to the Activity Tracker at hand; a list of all the charts available is contained in the Grid tab Charts (see also section Reports for a discussion of charts); the manager of the Activity Tracker can select some of the charts to be displayed in the Inspector tab Charts of an Activity Tracker, every participant can select favorite charts to be displayed on the personal User Home.

To find out what is going on in the ecosystem of a tracker, explore the information that is available in the many Grids, e.g.

• Activities contains a list of all the linked activities; various pre-defined filters allow you to organize this list to your liking, e.g. sorted by due date, sorted by priority, etc.

• Tracker Categories contains a list of all the categories defined for this Activity Tracker (see Category for additional information)

• Tracker Milestones contains a list of all the milestones defined for this Activity Tracker (see Milestone for additional information)

• Participants contains a list of all the tracker participants (see Participant for additional information)

• Work Records contains a list of all the work records submitted for activities linked to this Activity Tracker (see Work Records for additional information)

Please note that use of certain operations on Activity Trackers is restricted to Managers (see Participant )

Activity

An Activity is used to collect information about a set of actions, an event, something that needs to get done, etc. HickoryCRM supports various Activity Types , e.g. Incidents, Meetings, Sales Visits, Phone Calls, E-mails, etc. The figure below shows a Meeting as an example of an activity:

Some activity types feature type-specific attributes (see section Activity Types for a detailed discussion), but all Activities share a common set of attributes:

Anatomy of an Activity :

• Name of the Activity

• # contains the number of the Activity (it's actually a string to make integration with third-party systems easier.) - if you create an Activity with the operation "New Activity", HickoryCRM will automatically generate an activity number for you by incrementing the highest existing activity number by 1

• use Description for a short summary (approximately 60 or fewer characters) of the Activity, and Detailed Description to provide detailed information about the Activity; if appropriate, make use of the HTML feature to add explicit structure; this makes your Detailed Description easy to skim (you can start the HTML editor by clicking on the small icon [HTML] located just above the input field)

• Assigned to contains a reference to the contact whom this Activity is assigned to - some operations (e.g. "Assign to me") change the value of this field

• use Miscellaneous #1 to #3 to provide additional information

• Contract can contain a reference to a contract (e.g. Sales Order, Service Contract, etc.); this information is helpful as a reminder or useful for billing purposes

• the current state of an Activity is reflected by the value of State of Activity (where Activity is usually replaced by the type of the Activity); the set of valid states depends on the type of Activity - some operations (e.g. "Mark as complete") change the value of this field; typically, various Open states and various Closed states are supported

• Priority indicates whether an Activity must be treated/processed with high or low priority (by default, HickoryCRM supports the following values: low , normal , high , urgent , immediate )

• the fields Scheduled start and Scheduled end contain date/time information reflecting the planned scheduling of the Activity

• use Due by to indicate by when (date/time) an Activity must be completed

• the fields Actual start and Actual end contain actual date/time information

• use % complete to indicate what percentage of the total required effort has been made so far - some operations (e.g. "Mark as complete") change the value of this field

• hh (estimated effort) and mm (estimated effort) is information that is typically provided by a person who is responsible for the Activity - a guess on how many hours and minutes of effort it takes to complete the Activity

• Max deviation in % contains the maximum (expected) deviation of the actual effort from the estimated effort in % of the estimated effort - high values indicate a low confidence in the accuracy of the estimated effort numbers

• hh (actual effort) and mm (actual effort) are derived from the information contained in the linked Work Records

• Total votes contains the number of votes that have been cast for this Activity

To find out about other HickoryCRM objects related to the Activity at hand, explore the information that is available in the many Grids, e.g.

• Assigned Trackers contains a list of all the activity trackers this Activity is assigned to (because an individual activity can be assigned to multiple activity trackers - see Activity Tracker for additional information)

• Linked Activities contains a list of all the linked activities, i.e. other Activities referenced by this Activity (see Activity Links for additional information)

• Inbound Activity Links contains a list of all the activities with links to this Activity, i.e. other Activities referencing this Activity (see Activity Links for additional information)

• Involved Contacts (or Involved Accounts , depending on the Activity Types ) contains a list of all the contacts (accounts) playing an important role with relation to this Activity

• Work Records contains a list of all the work records submitted for this Activity (see Work Records for additional information)

• Votes contains a list of all the votes cast for this Activity (see Votes for additional information)

• Notes are particularly important in the context of Incident Management , but typically they play an important role in managing other activities too

Category

With the help of Categories you can group activities that belong together. For example, you might want to put all activities that are related to a particular product defect into a Category Defect XYZ , or you might want to assign all activities related to a new product version into a Category V1 (for Version 1):

Anatomy of a Category :

• Name of the Category

• a short Description of the Category

You can define as many Categories as you like and you can assign the same activity to multiple Categories if required. All the activities assigned to a Category are shown in the Grid Activities .

If an activity is assigned to multiple Categories , this linked activity will show up multiple times in the Grid Activities of the respective activity tracker, once for every Category it is assigned to; this is useful if you filter activities based on Category assignments.

Milestone

With the help of Milestones you can group activities that belong together because they relate to the same intermediate result/deliverable (which is commonly called a milestone). For example, you might want to assign all activities that are related to the first release candidate of a software product to Milestone RC1 , or you might want to assign all activities related to passing a chemistry field exam to Milestone Field Exam Chemistry :

Anatomy of a Milestone :

• Name of the Category

• a short Description of the Category

You can define as many Milestones as you like and you can assign the same activity to multiple Milestones if required. All the activities assigned to a Milestone are shown in the Grid Activities .

If an activity is assigned to multiple Milestones , this linked activity will show up multiple times in the Grid Activities of the respective activity tracker, once for every Milestone it is assigned to; this is useful if you filter activities based on Milestone assignments..

Participant

A contact that belongs the "ecosystem" of an activity tracker is called a Participant . (short for Tracker Participant ). Typically, the manager of an activity tracker adds HickoryCRM contacts to the list of Participants to indicate that the people they represent play a role with respect to the activity tracker at hand. Supported Participant roles are Manager , Member , Viewer . In the context of an activity tracker for a project, for example, you would add all project members to the list of Participants of the respective activity tracker. HickoryCRM automatically displays linked activities as well as votes and work records of a Participant:

Anatomy of a Tracker Participant (or just Participant ):

• Name of the Participant (e.g. a participant's nick name)

• use Description for a short summary of the typical roles/tasks/etc. of the Participant

• Contact contains a reference to an HickoryCRM Contact

• pick the appropriate (high-level) Role for the Participant at hand: Manager , Member , and Viewer are currently supported

To find out about other HickoryCRM objects related to the Tracker Participant at hand, explore the information that is available in the many Grids, e.g.

• Activities contains a list of all the assigned activities; various pre-defined filters allow you to organize this list to your liking, e.g. sorted by due date, sorted by priority, etc.

• Work Records contains a list of all the work records submitted by this Participant (see Work Records for additional information)

• Votes contains a list of all the votes cast by this Participant (see Votes for additional information)

Votes

Voting allows users to indicate that they would like certain activities to be accelerated, treated with a higher priority, incidents/bugs to get fixed, etc. Users of the system can help high-priority issues to garner attention so that they do not sit for a long time awaiting review/triage. A Vote is therefore useful feedback to managers of activity trackers and people responsible for individual activities:

Anatomy of a Vote:

• Name of the Vote (e.g. a participant's nick name)

• use Description for a short summary of the typical roles/tasks/etc. of the Participant

• Voter contains a reference to the HickoryCRM Contact who voted

To vote for an activity, execute the operation Tools > Vote for Activity on the respective activity. The total number of votes for an activity is always displayed if you inspect the respective activity:

Work Records

The concept of Work Records enables you to keep track of who devoted how much time to an individual activity. Powerful reporting features enable you to not only aggregate such information at various levels, you can also analyze actual effort information and compare it to effort estimates (see Figure 7-3 , for example). Furthermore, Work Records can serve as a basis for billing and controlling:

Anatomy of a Work Record:

• Name of the Work Record

• use Description for a short summary (approximately 60 or fewer characters) of the Work Record

• the fields Started at and Ended at contain date/time information, reflecting when work on an activity started and when it stopped; depending on your billing system you may have to submit at least one Work Record for each day worked on an activity (it is possible to submit multiple Work Records for the same activity)

• hh (pause duration) and mm (pause duration) reflect the total duration in hours and minutes you did not work on the activity at hand between Started at and Ended at (i.e. duration should reflect the cumulative pause if there were multiple interruptions). Example: if you worked from 8am to 5pm on an activity and took breaks from 9.30am to 10am and from 2pm to 2.15pm and had lunch from 11.30am to 12.15pm the cumulative pause amounts to 1 hour and 30 minutes, i.e. hh=1 mm=30)

• hh (duration) and mm (duration) are calculated by HickoryCRM and reflect the total duration in hours and minutes you did actually work on the activity at hand based on the information contained in Started at , Ended at , hh (pause duration) and mm (pause duration) . Example: if you worked from 8am to 5pm on an activity and took breaks from 9.30am to 10am and from 2pm to 2.15pm and had lunch from 11.30am to 12.15pm the net working time amounts to 7 hours and 30 minutes, i.e. hh=7 mm=30)

• Contact is a reference to the HickoryCRM contact who spent time on the activity (i.e. the worker) - by default this reference is set to the logged in user upon creation of a new Work Record, i.e. usually you will not have to set this reference manually

• check Billable to indicate that the billing system should process this Work Record

• Hourly rate contains the hourly rate applicable to this Work Record

• select the appropriate Currency applicable to the Hourly rate and the Amount

• Amount is calculated by HickoryCRM based on the net working time ( hh duration and mm duration ) and the Hourly rate

• Invoice can contain a reference to an invoice (adding these types of references is typically done by the billing system once a Work Record is processed)

Activity Links

The concept of Activity Links enables you to establish links between activities (each Activity Link establishes a link between exactly 2 activities). This concept is very powerful and allows you to capture any set of dependencies you might experience in reality. The following chart shows an example of task dependencies (each arrow represents an Activity Link):

Defining Activity Links is done by creating an (outbound) Activity Link, i.e. a link from the source to the destination (e.g. from Task A1 to Task A2). Once an Activity Link is established, HickoryCRM also supports "back navigation" (e.g. from Task A2 to Task A1). If you qualify (outbound) Activity Links, the corresponding Inbound Activity Link mirrors the dependency as shown in the figure below - based on the manually created Activity Link " Task A1 blocks Task A2 " HickoryCRM automatically creates an Inbound Activity Link " Task A2 is blocked by Task A1 "f :

Anatomy of an Activity Link:

• Name of the Activity Link

• a short Description of the Activity Link

• qualify an Activity Link with Type - many different values are supported enabling you to precisely describe the dependency, e.g. blocks , is blocked by , duplicates , is duplicated by , incorporates , is part of , is child of , is parent of , etc.

• Linked activity is a reference to the destination activity

To find out about links between Activities, explore the information that is available in the following Grids of the respective Activity, e.g.

• Linked Activities contains a list of all the (outbound) Activity Links and allows you to navigate to other Activities referenced by this Activity

• Inbound Activity Links contains a list of all the (inbound) Activity Links reflecting links to this Activity and allows you to navigate to other Activities referencing this Activity

Security

One of the basic security decisions you typically have to make is whether you want an activity tracker and all its related objects to be accessible by all users or whether you want to restrict access to the participants of an activity tracker. The former are called public activity trackers (i.e. all HickoryCRM users have access), the latter are called private activity trackers (i.e. only participants have access).

• Public Activity Trackers

  If you create a new activity tracker it is public by default so that all HickoryCRM users have access to the activity tracker and its related objects; the list of Owning Groups of a public activity tracker contains the User Group <SegmentName>\\Users, e.g. Standard\\Users, as shown in the figure below:

  Figure 4-11. Owning Group of a public Activity Tracker

  

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• Private Activity Trackers

  To make an activity tracker private, you simply add the appropriate User Group to the list of Owning Groups and then remove the Owning Group <SegmentName>\\Users. Please note that only administrators have permission to create User Groups and assign Users to User Groups . The figure below shows the list of Owning Groups of a private activity tracker.

  Figure 4-12. Owning Group of a private Activity Tracker

  

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If you work with private activity trackers it is strongly advised that you make use of the provided operations to create new activities, to assign activities to activity trackers, etc. because these operations ensure that all the permissions on all the created objects are set correctly.

Notes, Documents, and other Attachments

You can attach various types of objects to every HickoryCRM object to provide additional information:

• Notes can contain formatted (HTML) or unformatted text (if appropriate, make use of the HTML feature to add explicit structure and formatting - you can start the HTML editor by clicking on the small icon [HTML] located just above the input field) - do not forget to give your notes a meaningful title. Predefined filters allow you to quickly sort your notes based on the creation date or the last modification date.

• Documents will be fully supported in a future version of HickoryCRM Current versions of HickoryCRM allow you to manage references to documents stored in external systems (e.g. your company's document management system, a WebDAV server, etc.) or in the tab [Media] of HickoryCRM )

• The Media tab holds binary objects (e.g. image files, PDFs, etc.) attached to an HickoryCRM object.

• Ratings can be quite useful, not just for contacts.

In order to work with attached objects, it is usually necessary to unhide the respective Grid tabs so that you can look at the contents or create new objects. Click on the tab [>] to unhide hidden tabs (clicking on [<] causes them to collapse again):

As notes play a major role in activity management in general (and in incident management in particular), the Notes tab is usually shown in a pane of its own to enable skimming and quick creation of new notes.

Activity Types

HickoryCRM supports various activity types. They all share a common set of attributes and operations (see section Activity for a detailed discussion), but some activity types featu