Alert for Old Cases: Charts, Views, and Dashboards

Today, I continue to answer the question ‘what was the best way to use a workflow to send an email when a case had not been modified in 5 days?’ by discussing a potential solution using Charts, Views and Dashboards, oh my!

Lets continue to work on comparing a few solutions to alert a case owner when they are not doing their job. We just created a few new fields to calculate the number of days since the case has been modified and to rollup the most recent activity date. Now we are going to expose these to the user.

Charts

We could create a chart to break up our Cases based on the Days since Modification as shown below. Users could view this with their case view to know where to start working. Managers could also use this view to look for coaching opportunities.

Charts inside of Dynamics are convenient because you can click on the chart to filter your list and drill down into other details.

Views

Additionally, we could add these new fields and any other relevant fields to a system or personal view. Then we can sort or filter by the data we care about to drive awareness.

However, keep in mind you can sort by Rollup fields but you cannot sort by calculated fields.

Dashboards

Finally, we can combine all of this into a system or personal dashboard.

If using a personal dashboard, I like to create a team for that dashboard. I will create the team first, then I can share each of the components as I create them. The last steps will be to share the Dashboard with the team and then add your team members.

The Verdict

Just like the fields we created previously, this is only a partial solution to the problem. We are raising awareness but not guaranteeing that the user sees or responds to the issue (although one could argue email wouldn’t cause those actions either).

However, the main benefit of this solution is that it is keeping the user in Dynamics as much as possible. The problem with emailing a user is that it allows them to manage their workload outside of Dynamics (to a certain point) . If we can show them how their data is powering something then it may drive them to perform better and work to learn the system more. Another alternative to the email options shown next would be to create a task for the user in Dynamics instead of an email. These are user adoption discussions that you can have internally.

Next time, we’ll look at Recursive Workflow. Be sure to check out the other solutions in this series and let me know in the comments below what you think of this solution!