Fieldglass Features: #6 – Review your messaging

Hi There,

Welcome to update #6 of Fieldglass Features.

As a Fieldglass Product Adoption Executive in Australia – I manage a portfolio of 10-15 customers at any one point in time. Each customer is different with different program goals, operational, organisational or regulatory constraints.

The purpose of these blog posts is to highlight opportunities for customers to drive more value creation out of using the Fieldglass application or improve the user experience for your audiences. The Features we’ll discuss should be of interest to most customers – no matter the program type or geographical region.

September is one of my favourite times of the year, tending to the lawn +  vegie patch, starting to think about going for a swim, and of course – recommending to all my clients that it’s a great time for Fieldglass spring cleaning and reviewing your messaging.

What does it do:  Reviewing your messaging includes reviewing 3  aspects from the admin menu

System variables – These are fields or pieces or information included in messages

Messaging – All the different messages (~700+) that are available to generate notifications for various actions that take place. This is where the configuration takes place – customisation of content, if the message is turned on/off, who receives it, who else is notified, should it be escalated if no action taken?

Contextual help – guides users with customised instructional text when completing forms providing additional instructions or information to assist in gathering accurate information

Why should it be of interest:

Quite often overlooked as a low priority of the PMO but is crucial in understanding why common queries arise from the business to the PMO or delays in cycle times may be occurring or confusion regarding progress

System variables – you want to make sure that the business has the right content in a message, but not too much info so that the user has to trawl through all the info to find what they need. Does a TS approver really need 23 fields or pieces of information in an approval email? Or on the other hand is important information not currently displayed – such as WO spend remaining on a TS approval?

Messaging –  are the right people being notified at the right time when progress has occurred, stalled or when action is required? Is an SOW reviewer being notified when a supplier accepts an SOW

Contextual Help – is there a high occurrence of certain fields not being completed correctly? Do you need to educate the user population on the significance of a certain new custom field, is there redundant contextual text clogging up the UI?

• The impact of over-utilised messaging – messages lose their impact.
• Cycle times blow out because calls to action are ignored.
• Your PMO will be more focussed on chasing up people to perform required tasks rather than performing value add activities that benefit your business

• The impact of under-utilised messaging – again actioned not being taken because users are un-aware.
• PMO focussed on bridging the messaging gap to provide additional info, status updates etc to the business.
• Again resulting in greater portion of PMO’s capacity being utilised for administrative rather than value adding duties

Other considerations

• Do you have an enterprise communications team? Do you want to edit the default text on messages to more align with the tone of your corporate communications?
• A messaging review is also recommended post a program performance review. On identification of cycle times that you are looking to improve – review your messaging to understand if this may be the cause of extended cycle times. Are job postings taking too long to approve because approvers can’t see what is the total cost they are approving (enable the system variable to display estimated spend)
• A messaging review is also recommended to be done once program goals have been established or reviewed – make sure that your communications strategy aligns to the program goals. Eg if you’re looking to improve the hiring manager experience – e           nable average time to hire on the Job posting approval email to help manage their expectations?
• How has your program matured?
  • Typically on go-live more than less is the general consensus with regards to enabling messages, not that the business is more used to the work flows – are you able to disable some of the notification emails to create less noise
  • Typically on go-live, customisation of message content can take a bit of a back seat to more critical activities. Now with the program bedded down it can be a good time to review the default message and tailor to your audience
  • Again – on go-live, implementation teams tend to go pretty heavy on the contextual text to help the user community get used to using the system. As the user group becomes more proficient you can be removing contextual help fields to make the UI more user friendly and less “busy”

Effort to implement –easy, just needs some effort from the PMO directed to review

Effort to test  – super easy,

Benefits to business – more efficient cycle times, better user experience, PMO able to focus on value add activities

Configuration:

• No configuration is needed to review your messaging – however users who will be reviewing / editing will need user role administrative permissions of “configuration” > manage enabled. (there doesn’t exist an individual permission for managing system variables, messaging or contextual help, it’s encompassed within the “configuration” administrative permission.
• To make it super easy to review your messaging configuration, raise a case with Fieldglass PMO support desk to request a copy of your instance’s “messaging workbook”. You will receive an excel file including all messages, content, recipients etc, which makes it super easy to filter, review and identify messages that need to be updated which can then be done via the UI. For system variables and contextual help – these are managed from the administrative menu in the UI
• If you are looking to test messages in test environment, remember be sure to update the recipients email address in the test environment as these are wiped when the test environments are refreshed

Full details around messaging module can be found once you have logged into SAP help and searching the administration fundamentals guide for “messaging”

Thoughts?? comment below and let me know!