This guide will take you through Baton's best practice recommendations for building and using templates.
Purpose of a Template:
A template is the outline of an ideal implementation project plan that displays and re-enforces the best practices your team has identified as essential to successful set-up and adoption of your technology. It serves as a guide to your teams and to customers, and an accountability tool for all throughout implementation and onboarding.
Templates automate creation of consistent winning implementation strategies in minutes, allowing your team to position themselves as subject matter experts on deploying your services effectively.
Templates should be created for each implementation process that has regular distinct properties - for distinct products, customer types, integrations, service level, etc. distinct templates should be created.
The Baton team is happy to give guidance and assistance on effective template creation as part of onboarding. Reach out to your Customer Success Representative to discuss.
Template Structure:
Effective templates divide implementations into logical and achievable phases, milestones, and tasks that give customers a feeling of visibility, control, and accomplishment throughout the process, and convey a continuous journey towards success.
Dividing implementations into phases, milestones, and tasks,
Phases are the high level sections of an effective implementation. They should be divided by significant shifts in intention or responsibility.
I.e. The kickoff phase will consist of a set-up milestone including pre-kickoff call prep tasks and a kickoff milestone including a kickoff call and follow-up tasks.
Milestones are a collection of tasks with a distinct connection or deliverable achieved from joint completion. They can be achieved sequentially or in conjunction.
I.e. a collection of data intake tasks, a collection of training tasks, a collection of tasks to configure a particular module of your solution, etc.
Effective Task Structure and Assignment:
Tasks should be clearly defined, actionable activities that provide clear information to guide customers and team members through the task. We recommend utilizing the task description to provide a detailed explanation of how to complete the task, attaching any relevant documentation and links to the task, and using checklists to provide a clear breakdown of any granular steps associated with a task.
Tasks should be assigned to both vendor and customer participants and individual responsibility should be designated wherever possible.
Timeline Risk:
Timeline risk is Baton’s prediction of whether a specific task and a project will be completed on-time or late (and by how much). Risk is based on task status, start and due dates, dependencies, estimated time effort, and hours logged for the task. Configuring templates to assess timeline risk effectively requires the following:
Dependencies
Dependencies should be defined wherever relevant to clearly track which tasks cannot be started until a parent task (or tasks) are completed. When a parent task is completed, Baton will notify the assignee that the dependent task (or tasks) are unblocked.
With Task Dependency Dateshift, all of your dependent tasks' due dates will automatically shift as soon as the parent due date changes, showing you and your clients the downstream effects if a parent task is delayed. If a task has multiple parent tasks, this will be calculated based on the latest date for all parents.
Time estimates
Each task should include a time estimate. This gives the assignee an expectation and also provides Baton guidance in calculating Risk. If only a start and due date are provided, Baton expects that the task will take the full duration to complete, but with a time estimate Baton will take this estimate into account. Baton assumes there are 8 work hours per day.
I.e. A task with a duration of 3 days will be considered at risk of being late if less than 3 days remain to complete that task. However, if that same task includes a time estimate of 1 hour, then Baton will calculate risk based on 1 day duration since this task can be completed in less than 1 day.