I always had the problem of how to manage my tasks. Outlook Tasks? If you have more than 100 – that makes no sense. If they are structured? I tried MS Project. But MS Project demands too much structure as of my taste. Furthermore there is always this problem of: You have a file on your PC that you can only open with this one program: MS Project only on your PC. How often had I to re-install MS Project?
Well – I thought I would go to the cloud. I logged in force.com and defined my own Business Object “Goal”. That for me was the better term than Workitem, because I think it is more important what to reach instead of what to do (and probably reach nothing at all). That helps me to keep focus. It is a constant reminder to me not just to do things, but always to ask: Why? What do I want to reach, if I am doing this and that – or just not do it.
I defined the “Goal” Business Object. I wanted to make it hierarchical with subgoals. However this is not possible with force.com. You can only have a two level hierarchy of business object – like invoice header and invoice item. And you can not define the hierarchy within the same object (goal – subgoal = goal). Strange. What you can do however is to define a relationship of a goal to another goal and call it “subgoal”. This still gives me the usability I need. I get a subgoal create partition in the goal screen and I can navigate to the supergoal (after I have defined the field). So all seems fine? No. If I delete a supergoal I would expect, that subgoals are also deleted. Not so with that type of relationship.But in practice I can live with it, because I am not deleting Goals so often anyway, because I work with a status which is manually set. I keep the completed goals for reference purposes. More than once it happend to me that I asked myself: How did I do that three weeks ago? This and that proceture (e.g. installation of something – to a second computer). Then I was happy that I could just select the old goal and look into the detailed descriptions. The only thing that I am missing here is the same thing as with the missing deletion function: The deep copy is also not possible – i.e. to copy a goal with all of its subgoals, so that I can use it with a fresh status. For this coding would have to be done – and I was not willing to learn APEX – the force.com programming language – at this stage. I’d rather live with the compromise.
So after a little bit of trying I was able to create my goals and subgoals, attach notes, attach files, attach tasks (which I did not really use), manage the status of them, prioritize them, even create relationships to other force.com business objects like opportunity, and search and create my own selections and reports. That was better than any tool that I had used before. And I could access it from everywhere – which I actually needed. I can access it with iPhone as well, even though the salesforce client does not support custom business objects (like my “Goal”). So I have to use the browser. This is not so user friendly, but possible.
In the meanwhile I created about 1.500 goals all in all, most of them subgoals and sub-sub goals. I could work quite well until I thought: How much work do I actually have to do? So I added the field “Remaining Days” and “Remaining Hours” for the Remaining Effort (I tend to keep it simple). This is an absolutely great feature: Add a field on the fly with an existing database and use it right away. However what I wanted of course was to aggregate the effort of subgoals and sub-sub goals to the supergoal – but depending on the status (not count completed ones). So I was at the point again of learning APEX or not. I had a look over it, but I thought: Why should I learn the proprietary APEX and then live with the limitations of the platform (e.g. only two level business objects)? How I resolved this situation I will report in another post.