Issue Management
Practical solution to the problem of day to day firefighting.
How many post-it notes, emails or memos are created trying to keep track of the milliard issues and problems you need to handle on the average business day? Wouldn’t it be good if all those memos, notes and queries were tied directly to any relevant data that depended on that activity? That’s how the VizBiz handles issues.
In EVERY module, “issues” can arise on ANY record.
For example; In Stock Control, a manager might wish to query the actual amount of a particular product in Stock. In Sales Orders the customer might ring in with a query or complaint which cannot be dealt with there and then. In the Cashbook, the ledger clerk might need to know why a given item has non-standard VAT or the meaning of an entry on a petty cash receipt etc.
The VizBiz has a unique feature which allows any user to raise an “issue” with any record in the Database. They can nominate any other user to deal with it and they can set a deadline by which it needs to be dealt with. They entered the details of the query into a simple on screen form. By default all such issues are echoed to the system Diary.
If the nominated user is logged in, they get a message, within a few seconds, telling them an issue has been raised which requires their input. The system will optionally then take them directly to the relevant record to deal with the issue. If the issue is resolved, they can mark it as such, or else they can respond with questions of their own or even pass on the issue to another more appropriate user.
Until an issue is resolved, the nominated user will be reminded they have (one or more) unresolved issues to deal with every time they enter the relevant module. They may still ignore the reminder but nobody can pretend they forgot it!
Managers can keep track of all such issues simply by applying standard filters which seek out any unresolved issues or, more usefully, unresolved issues approaching or past their deadlines, or, for more routine “performance monitoring” resolved issues in an arbitrary date range.