Creating and Customising a Track :

Creating and Customising a Track

The concept of Tracks is heavily inspired by Kanban boards, which allow you to easily visualise the journey of a process as it passes through each of its stages. As items flow from left to right, each column will reflect the status of its lifecycle. For example, ‘To-do’, ‘In progress’, ‘Pending review’ ‘Resolved’.

By default, you will see an unfiltered view of all Track items along with some additional details to encourage prioritisation and collaborative working

ISMS.online comes with pre-built Tracks, including:

Information Asset Inventory Track

ISMS Corrective Actions & Improvements Track

Security Incident Management Track

Due to the functionality of Tracks, it's possible to tailor them to support many purposes - such as managing correspondence, referrals, customer service, and server patching.

Creating a Track

Tracks are populated with Track Items, these are pieces of work represented on the Track, it progresses through the columns until it has been completed. An Item can be given a category, assigned to a member of the team and have Documents and Connected Initiatives attached to it.

Visibility

Other users can see a Track and its items if they’re a part of the team, as with all ISMS.online Initiatives. You can check who has access to the Track by clicking Team in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

Navigating to Tracks

All Tracks can be found by hovering over the 'Work' menu in the navigation bar and selecting 'All work', this list can then be filtered by 'Tracks':

Creating a new Track

New Tracks can be created by clicking the green 'Create new' button in the top right of the 'All work' page. From here you can select 'Track' and click the green 'Create new' button again. You can then name your Track and set its purpose and goals; these are optional but a great way to keep the team focused on what this area is.

Customising a Track

Your Track can be customised from the Settings page. From this page, you can customise your Track in various ways.

Click Settings in the top right-hand corner of your Track, here you can change the name and description of the Track and customise the statuses and categories.

Track Settings

To customise your Track, navigate to the Track page and click on the 'Settings' link in the top right of your screen. This will take you to your settings page:

Track Name and Purpose and Goals

You can change the name and the purpose and goals of your Track at any time, remember to click Save Settings after making amendments.

Status

Statuses form the basis of the Track and help you to Track Items as they progress towards completion. They also help you identify any build-ups in the system, so you can ensure workflows freely.

There is a column on the Track for each status. There are two mandatory statuses; ‘To-do’, which is always at the start and ‘Resolved’, which is always at the end. You can edit the titles of the To-do and Resolved statuses, but they can not be deleted or removed as they remain a part of the core functionality of the work area. Status can be added, edited or deleted in between to meet your needs.

You can have as many statues as you need and the screen will expand to fill your monitor ensuring you can visualise your work across the whole system.

Outcomes

When resolving a Track item you are asked to define the outcome of that work, by default the Track is configured with four outcomes; Complete, Incomplete; Duplicate and Declined. These can be customised as you need via the settings area of the Track. Customising outcomes works in the same way as Status and Category customisation.

Upon resolving an item, this window will pop up:

Financial Value

Activating this option allows you to assign a financial value to Track items, The values will them be totalled for each status (column) and the Track overall.

Please note, changing currency does not perform any conversions on values you’ve entered, just the currency symbol to represent those values.

Deleting & Archiving

Deletion – Admins of a Track can choose to delete it, doing so will remove the Track, all Track items and all discussions, documents, notes, tasks and anything else the Track contained so this should only be used when you are certain that deleting the information is required.

Archiving – We also offer the ability to Archive the Track, this will remove it from your list of active Tracks but it can still be accessed via the 'Archived' button on the Tracklisting page, contents of the Track will still be searchable from the main search bar.

Applying Default Deadlines to Items

If you operate to a standard response time for items on your track (or just want to make sure track items aren’t left without a deadline) you can configure your track to apply a default deadline when a new item is added.

Setup

To activate, edit or remove a default deadline you will need to have Administer rights over the track in question.

Click on to the settings cog in the top right of the track area
Find the grey panel with the heading “Default Deadline” and click the edit pencil for that panel
You will see three drop downs for Weeks, Days and Hours that allow you to specify the deadline to be applied when an item is created. If you want to remove a deadline set each of these drop downs to the “select” option

How it works

If you set a default deadline of 14 days. On the 1st June a new item is created at 10:00 that item will be given a due date of 10:00 on the 15th June. Please note that the default deadline doesn’t take into account business hours, weekends or bank holidays.

If a track item has a due date set by default it can still be amended later to reflect a change in the deadline for that one item. If you amend the default deadline it will affect new items created after that point, no existing due dates will be altered.

Note: Now that you've created and customised a Track, see here for how to work within Tracks.