Managing Crew and Contractor Work

Work crews and contractors are often relied upon to find/search for the appropriate work that’s been assigned to them within the TreeKeeper software. This can become increasingly difficult when appropriate steps have not been taken to ensure they find the work you’ve intended them to perform quickly and easily.

When creating and assigning work records, properly assiging a work record’s “Project”, “Work Type”, “Crew”, “Status” and “Priority” will provide confidence that the appropriate work gets performed by the appropriate crews without hesitation. In the recommended workflow below, we emphasize using Crew, Status, and the use of Quick Filters for proper scheduling of work.

Once an effective workflow has been put in place, progress of work performed can be tracked through searching and reporting much more easily!

Setup

When creating work records in advance, we recommend assigning the Project and Work Type, but leaving the Status as Requested and/or the Crew as “To Be Determined” until the work is ready to be performed.

Status (Requested, Scheduled, Completed): When future work is being planned, a work record having a Status of “Requested” can be created.  The Crew can be set to “TBD”, and the actual Crew can be assigned or not. Once ready for the work to be performed, update the Status to Scheduled by entering a Scheduled Date. Internal Crews and Contractors can be instructed to ignore "Requested" work... Only "Scheduled" work that is assigned to their crew should be actionable.

Crew: Work can be pre-planned without triggering any crew or contractor action by using a "To Be Determined" or “TBD” Crew list value.  Once the work is ready to be assigned, you can isolate and edit or batch (global) edit the work records to assign the Crew and change the Status to "Scheduled" with a Scheduled Date. Work Crew Management

Priority: This can be used to signal to a crew or contractor that certain work should be completed before other work.  Priority List Management

Open

Open

Work Type: Work Type should always be assigned before scheduling work. Crews can search the work assigned to them in a scheduled status filtering their results by Work Type if performing one particular task throughout their day.

Project: Projects can be used to both classify work records (for easier searching/filtering) and manage budgets for collections of work.Project List Management

Create a Group Quick Filter

A Group can be created that has all the users of a particular crew. Once this group is created, a Quick Filter can be created and made accessible by only users assigned to that group. This Quick Filter should be constructed to only return Scheduled work records assigned to those group members (or crew).

When crews/contractors log in, if this filter is the first thing they run, they’ll have a quick list of all the work scheduled to be performed by them and no other work.

Instructions to Crews

We recommend instructing crews and contractors that work should only be actionable when the Crew is assigned to them and the Status is set to Scheduled. Additionally, we would recommend instructing crews and contractors to prioritize their work using the Scheduled Date (first in/first out), unless trumped by Priority.

Alert Quick Filters and/or Reports can be set up to help crews more easily find the work that’s been scheduled for them to complete. These would incorporate using a criteria of Crew = their crew, and Status = “Scheduled”.