Best Practices for Tessitura Assistance Requests within your organization

In my experience, these requests happen because the basic understanding of what is already in the pipeline is not being communicated effectively. A form is an important part of the process, but education of the process and what is both currently in the pipeline and what is coming in the future is vital. 

We use a system that communicates and allows everyone to see what is happening organization-wide. You can use Excel to do this but if you have the budget, Miro is a great visualization tool to get you started. We plan by fiscal quarter and use three main categories for the visualization: Blackout, Big Projects and Ongoing Small Projects. I'll briefly explain these below.

• Blackouts: During the initial layout of what we call the Project Board, we identify things that are already scheduled on the calendar. For us at the museum this could be large exhibitions, holidays, important dates (like everyone's planned time off or typical times of year/season that are extra busy like budget time or spring break). Anything that might make or impede the ability to complete a task.
• Big Projects: Pretty self explanatory. You would brainstorm what big projects may be coming up. We define big projects as projects that cross departments or take multiple resources (internal and external) to complete or even something that will take more than a set period of time for a resource (our threshold, though not firm is 40 hours). Things like system changes, operational changes, research projects, etc. 
• Ongoing Small Projects: Again, somewhat self explanatory. These are smaller projects like monthly or quarterly system updates that only take a few hours, or data clean up. These are not necessarily tasks that are assigned (through a support desk or a supervisor, but they could be, depending on the level of detail required).

We try to brainstorm these out two years on our Project Board by quarter. 

Here is where the forms come in. We do have both a technical support desk that collects requests as well as a few forms (one for Report creation, one for Ticketed Exhibition builds and one for Promo Codes). These are evaluated by a small, cross departmental team and added to our project Planner (Microsoft Office Planner) or assigned in the support desk solution. 

The point of my rambling is, the Project Board makes it easy to show anyone what is in the pipeline and what is currently being worked on - small and large. When upper management comes in with a last minute big ask, you can take a look at the board and ask which projects they would like to put on hold (as hopefully, you have on your Project Board, the projects they have asked for previously) to slot in their current request. In some cases, they will simply say that they can wait on Project X while you work on the new, urgent request. In other cases, they will quickly determine that the current urgent request isn't so urgent and you can initiate a conversation about where it fits into the Project Board.

Another benefit is that you also now have a great way to look back at all the things that were accomplished for the year/quarter/month. 

hope you find this helpful. Cheers!

In my experience, these requests happen because the basic understanding of what is already in the pipeline is not being communicated effectively. A form is an important part of the process, but education of the process and what is both currently in the pipeline and what is coming in the future is vital. 

We use a system that communicates and allows everyone to see what is happening organization-wide. You can use Excel to do this but if you have the budget, Miro is a great visualization tool to get you started. We plan by fiscal quarter and use three main categories for the visualization: Blackout, Big Projects and Ongoing Small Projects. I'll briefly explain these below.

• Blackouts: During the initial layout of what we call the Project Board, we identify things that are already scheduled on the calendar. For us at the museum this could be large exhibitions, holidays, important dates (like everyone's planned time off or typical times of year/season that are extra busy like budget time or spring break). Anything that might make or impede the ability to complete a task.
• Big Projects: Pretty self explanatory. You would brainstorm what big projects may be coming up. We define big projects as projects that cross departments or take multiple resources (internal and external) to complete or even something that will take more than a set period of time for a resource (our threshold, though not firm is 40 hours). Things like system changes, operational changes, research projects, etc. 
• Ongoing Small Projects: Again, somewhat self explanatory. These are smaller projects like monthly or quarterly system updates that only take a few hours, or data clean up. These are not necessarily tasks that are assigned (through a support desk or a supervisor, but they could be, depending on the level of detail required).

We try to brainstorm these out two years on our Project Board by quarter. 

Here is where the forms come in. We do have both a technical support desk that collects requests as well as a few forms (one for Report creation, one for Ticketed Exhibition builds and one for Promo Codes). These are evaluated by a small, cross departmental team and added to our project Planner (Microsoft Office Planner) or assigned in the support desk solution. 

The point of my rambling is, the Project Board makes it easy to show anyone what is in the pipeline and what is currently being worked on - small and large. When upper management comes in with a last minute big ask, you can take a look at the board and ask which projects they would like to put on hold (as hopefully, you have on your Project Board, the projects they have asked for previously) to slot in their current request. In some cases, they will simply say that they can wait on Project X while you work on the new, urgent request. In other cases, they will quickly determine that the current urgent request isn't so urgent and you can initiate a conversation about where it fits into the Project Board.

Another benefit is that you also now have a great way to look back at all the things that were accomplished for the year/quarter/month. 

hope you find this helpful. Cheers!