How the SAC Calendar Transforms Organization and Productivity - Blog 1

Hello again and welcome to this new blog series. Throughout this series, I will cover the following topics:

• What is the SAC Calendar?

• Tasks – the different type of tasks, start-by options & calendar roles

• The Planning Process

In this blog, I will provide a general overview of the SAC Calendar and address some common questions about how your business can efficiently utilize this feature within SAC. I'll also delve into the essential components of the SAC Calendar: the tasks. Without these tasks, the SAC Calendar would be just a basic calendar. These tasks are the key elements that unlock all the benefits of the SAC Calendar!

What is the SAC Calendar?

The SAC Calendar is a powerful scheduling and planning tool integrated within SAC. It is designed to help businesses simplify their workflow, enhance collaboration, and ensure efficient task management.

The SAC Calendar enables users to: 

1. Plan and Schedule Activities: Create and manage tasks, events, and deadlines to ensure all team members are aligned and aware of their responsibilities.

2. Collaborate Seamlessly: Facilitate communication and collaboration among team members by sharing calendars, assigning tasks, and tracking progress in real-time.

3. Automate Processes: Automate repetitive processes and set up notifications and reminders to keep projects on track and prevent important deadlines from being missed.

4. Enhance Visibility and Accountability: Provide clear visibility into project timelines, resource allocation, and task dependencies, promoting accountability and ensuring everyone stays on the same page.

To access the SAC calendar, you must first login to your SAC tenant. Then in the left-pane menu, you can choose Calendar.

Another way of accessing the calendar is through an email notification, only if a task has been assigned to you as seen below. You can click on the ‘Open Task’ button to open the SAC tenant. You will still need to login to access the SAC calendar.

Tasks

The SAC Calendar has many tasks you can create to help plan and schedule activities as well as collaborate seamlessly. Businesses can create the following tasks:

• General tasks

• Review tasks

• Composite tasks

• Data locking tasks

• Data action tasks

• Processes

General Tasks

General tasks have one or more assignees tasked with data entry in your planning process, or with any other work you want to organize in the calendar. In your planning process, general tasks let assignees enter data directly in the story that the task owner attached as a work file. Alternatively, the owner can also add any URL to the task to gather information.

Review Tasks

Review tasks involve one or more assignees responsible for approving or rejecting the work result. These tasks typically require thorough examination of the work to ensure it meets predefined requirements. This process ensures quality control and accountability, as assignees must justify their decisions.

When creating a review task, you get 2 options to start the review task by:

• Dependency

• Parent process

When setting a review task with dependencies, you need to specify the task it depends on and the status that will trigger the review task. The possible statuses are

• Successful

• Partially successful

• Cancelled

• Failed

You can also delegate review tasks to colleagues who do not have SAC accounts. Simply provide their email address, and they will receive instructions on how to create an account. When the owner of the review task adds the assignees, they’ll have the option to invite non-member via email, add yourself or add a member of your team.

Composite Tasks

A composite task is a combination of a General Task and a Review Task. You can make a composite task to gather data for your planning or any other calendar-managed workflow. Composite tasks help you keep track of project progress. You can do them alone or assign them to colleagues. If multiple people work on it, only one needs to finish it.

If you want others to review the work, you can add one or more reviewers. You can even assign different reviewers for different review rounds. When one round finishes, the next set of reviewers gets notified. If multiple reviewers work on it, it's done when one approves.

You can decide how to split time between assignees and reviewers. Assignees can attach work files, like stories or URLs, and enter data directly. Once one of them finishes, reviewers can start.

You can set the start date and time as needed, even for recurring tasks. You can link the task to another event's status or its parent process for synchronized starts.

Data Locking Task

You may need to create a task that allows you to specify a portion of your data within your model/story for data locking, as well as determine the target lock state.

Lock State	Description
Open	The data will be unlocked and can be changed by any users who have permissions to enter values for the model.
Restricted	The data will be locked, but data locking owners can still change values.
Locked	The data will be locked, and only Admin users and the model creator can change values.

A data locking task enables you to determine which data to lock or unlock, set the timing for this change, and designate who is responsible for managing the lock state.

You may want to gather data for different parts of your plan at different times, and at other times, you may want to prevent further changes. If you are the owner of a specific region within the model, you can schedule automatic data locks, which SAC will apply at the scheduled time. If someone else is responsible for that region, you can create the task and assign it to the appropriate individuals.

Data Action Task

A data action is a flexible planning tool for making structured changes to planning data in SAC. Data actions are processes that involve a sequence of operations.

These operations could be copying data, running complex calculations etc. These data actions can be scheduled in the calendar.  This means that planning processes can be automated, without manual intervention. Please note, to create a scheduled data action task, you must have an existing data action created.

Start By:

Tasks need to be started by a trigger action. 

Start by options include the following:

• Time: allows you to schedule the task to start at a specific date and time. Most fields are editable, but the start date cannot be changed once it has passed. Example: A report needs to be generated every Monday at 9 AM. The task is scheduled to run automatically at the specified time each week, ensuring the report is ready for the Monday morning meeting.

• Dependency: the task will commence only after a specified preceding task is completed. Example: The task is scheduled to run automatically at the specified time each week, ensuring the report is ready for the Monday morning meeting. The task to send the email will only trigger once the system confirms that the data import task has finished, ensuring that the latest data is available before the notification is sent.  

• Parent Process: This ties the task's start to the beginning or completion of a parent process within a workflow. Example:  A task to start data analysis should begin immediately after the parent process of data collection has started. As soon as the parent process, which is the data collection, begins, the data analysis task is triggered, allowing for immediate processing of incoming data.

Calendar Roles

There are many roles associated when creating calendar tasks. These include:

• Owner: Creates the task or process and can assign ownership to others e.g. a colleague

• Assignee: Completes the work

• Reviewer: Checks the assignees' work.

• Viewer: Has read-only access

Conclusion

Using the SAC calendar can significantly enhance workflow organization and efficiency.

By creating various task types and assigning them to team members, you ensure a structured and accountable workflow. The SAC calendar allows for automatic notifications and system activities like data locking that will ensure timely and accurate project completion.

The SAC calendar helps manage tasks and deadlines efficiently, facilitates collaboration, and provides robust oversight, making it an essential tool for any business to effectively organize workflow.

If you or your colleagues have further questions and would like to understand more about Datasphere, please feel free to contact us - gemma.regan@seaparkconsultancy.com