Get an overview of your department’s activities with automatic delegation

Most managers find it hard to get an overview of their department’s activities, especially when they’re responsible for overseeing more than one team. It can be a lot easier, however, if you use one Pipefy’s advanced resources: automatic delegation.

Automatic delegation (also known as smart delegation) is actually a combination of two of Pipefy’s advanced features: connections and automations.

These features are used to automatically create connected cards on secondary pipes according to pre-established conditions and after they’re done, move the cards on the primary pipe as well.

To make it easier to understand how automatic delegation works, I’ll use a practical example using fictional characters.

How does automatic delegation work?

Company XYZ has 150 employees. The customer operations department is the company’s largest team, taking up just a little over half of their workforce.

The department’s manager is responsible for overseeing all 80 employee’s divided into 5 teams: inbound sales, outbound sales, expansion, customer success and customer support.

At the beginning of each week, the manager has a meeting with each team’s leader to go over the week’s activities and then pass them on to their teams. Each team has its own pipe to manage their activities.

The department’s manager had access to each of these teams but he claims to have a hard time keeping track of the progress of the department’s activities.

Their Pipefy dedicated consultant heard about the manager’s situation and came up with a practical solution.

The department’s manager would now have his own pipe, the department pipe, connected to each of the team’s pipes.

The manager’s pipe would have 3 simple phases: backlog, in progress and done. It would also have color coded labels for each team so he could easily identify the tasks on his pipe.

At the weekly meeting the department manager, along with the team leaders, would add the week’s tasks to his pipe. So far, so good, right? But where does the automatic delegation part begin?

How to setup automatic delegation?

To make work flow more smoothly, the Pipefy consultant proposed they used automations (with conditions).

Every time a card entered the “in progress” phase in the manager’s pipe, a new connected card would be created in the:

• Inbound sales pipe, if it had the red inbound sales label;
• Outbound sales pipe, if it had the blue outbound sales label;
• Expansion pipe, if it had the green expansion label;
• Customer success pipe, if it had the purple customer success label;
• Customer support pipe, if it had the orange customer support label.[/col]

To do that, they’ve accessed Apps & Integrations > Automations. They chose the event “when a card is moved” in pipe “customer operations” to phase “in progress” according to this condition: Label > is equal to > inbound sales.

The action was “created a new connected card” in pipe “inbound sales”.

They’ve matched the corresponding fields and that’s it, first automation done.

They’ve repeated the operation four more times using each team’s label in the condition and each team’s pipe in the action. It may seem like a lot of work but it only takes a few minutes to setup and it can save hours in the future.

How could he keep track of the delegated tasks?

To make sure the manager would always know when the delegated tasks were finished, their dedicated consultant suggested they configured a second automation. That way, every time a connected card in any of the team’s pipes was moved to done, so would the ‘parent’ card on the manager’s pipe.

Here’s how they set it up:

Event: “When all connected cards are moved to a phase” in pipe “inbound sales” to phase “done”;

Action: “Move the parent card” in pipe “customer operations” to phase “done”.

They did the same to all other pipes and that was it.

The customer operations manager was now able to keep track of all his teams’ tasks.

He could quickly consult the status of each task by opening the card and viewing the connected card information. That made him and all team leaders much more effective, saving them much time they lost searching for disconnected information.

This resource was very useful to save the customer operation’s manager time. What do you think about trying it out? It only takes a few minutes to set up and can help you save precious hours of your time.

If you need any help setting it up, contact our support team via in app chat, they’d be glad to help!