warren_t
Registered
Hello all,
I was hoping to get some feedback from others on how they manage support issues in the greater project view of their world with GTD.
I work in a large company as a Business Intelligence ( I know…it’s an oxymoron) IT person out in the business ,(not a part of IT). Part of my job is to support the day to day problems that users of a computer reporting system might have and liaise with our IT to department to get a resolution to the problem. Examples of this might by where a computer interface has not worked correctly, or a user requires system access or a report needs to be re-written.
At the moment, I have a “catch-all” project in Outlook and a supporting project materials file called “User Issues” and under this I associate next actions for all of the operational problems that get raised. This file has gotten bigger and bigger and it’s now at the point where I am de-sensitised to the contents and things have gotten lost in there. The next actions list for my “User issues” project contains every next action for every user issue and there could be 20 user issues in there at any one time, all mixed up. On some occasions if a user issue becomes big and large, it gets it’s own project name, but I haven’t been consistent here. There must be a better way!
I’m thinking that I should make each user issue a project in itself where there is more than one next action. I’d still like to group them though so that I can see all user issues that exist. I was thinking that in Outlook I could prefix all User issue projects with the term “[User Issue] – Issue Name” or perhaps even use the idea of a sub project (But I’ve not seen how to do this easily in MS Outlook – I use Bill Kratz’s Projects-as-Contacts method)
I also considered keeping the list of User issues separate to my projects list (Like in a MS Excel Spreadsheet) but I’m keen to keep it all in the one place for speed of processing.
I may of answered my own question but I’m keen to here your ideas or suggestions, so thanks in advance!
Regards,
Warren
I was hoping to get some feedback from others on how they manage support issues in the greater project view of their world with GTD.
I work in a large company as a Business Intelligence ( I know…it’s an oxymoron) IT person out in the business ,(not a part of IT). Part of my job is to support the day to day problems that users of a computer reporting system might have and liaise with our IT to department to get a resolution to the problem. Examples of this might by where a computer interface has not worked correctly, or a user requires system access or a report needs to be re-written.
At the moment, I have a “catch-all” project in Outlook and a supporting project materials file called “User Issues” and under this I associate next actions for all of the operational problems that get raised. This file has gotten bigger and bigger and it’s now at the point where I am de-sensitised to the contents and things have gotten lost in there. The next actions list for my “User issues” project contains every next action for every user issue and there could be 20 user issues in there at any one time, all mixed up. On some occasions if a user issue becomes big and large, it gets it’s own project name, but I haven’t been consistent here. There must be a better way!
I’m thinking that I should make each user issue a project in itself where there is more than one next action. I’d still like to group them though so that I can see all user issues that exist. I was thinking that in Outlook I could prefix all User issue projects with the term “[User Issue] – Issue Name” or perhaps even use the idea of a sub project (But I’ve not seen how to do this easily in MS Outlook – I use Bill Kratz’s Projects-as-Contacts method)
I also considered keeping the list of User issues separate to my projects list (Like in a MS Excel Spreadsheet) but I’m keen to keep it all in the one place for speed of processing.
I may of answered my own question but I’m keen to here your ideas or suggestions, so thanks in advance!
Regards,
Warren