Best practices for tracking job flow

[Karen_Siugzda]

Hi there,
We’ve just started implementing Airtable to facilitate job workflow between Design and Marketing departments. I’m curious if anyone has suggestions for best views that individual designers can set up to track their own jobs.

View filtered to jobs assigned to them - got it.
View filtered to initial due date - got it.
Status field (to know if it’s in for design or out with Marketing) - got it.

Beyond that, I’d love for all of the designers to easily be able to track when a job bounces back and forth between design and marketing. After the job has been sent out for the first time, that initial due date field is now irrelevant, so only sorting by that field will not properly sort jobs in a helpful sequence after a week or 2.

I set up a “last modified” field so I’m testing out the usefulness of that. It seems to have potential!

Thought I’d see how others are keeping track of jobs that have frequent back and forth, and setting up views to properly track latest changes, which job needs attention first, etc.

Thanks!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

One small thing you could do is use one of these two patterns to bubble important/urgent jobs into view:

1. Implement a Checkbox field called “Urgent” or something like that - check when the job is “Urgent” for whatever reason

   • Group views by “Urgent” and then sort by due date - this ensure “Urgent” jobs always show at the top in their own “Urgent” group, regardless of their relative date
   • (Make sure to filter out completed jobs, or else completed “Urgent” jobs will clutter that group)

2. Implement a Single Select field called “Importance” or something like that - create multiple options that can categorize jobs by their urgency

   • Use filtered Kanban views that are sorted by date, so that jobs appear in “swimlanes” that indicate their urgency, and are sorted by date within those “swimlanes”

[Karen_Siugzda]

Thanks Jeremy!
I like those suggestions. Typically we either have “RUSH” or “Normal” (of course, “RUSH” is always in all caps! hahaha)

So including a way to group/sort by that category definitely makes sense. Awesome idea.
Thanks!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Karen_Siugzda:

we either have “RUSH” or “Normal” (of course, “RUSH” is always in all caps! hahaha)

I worked in a testing laboratory for several years, and we had a “RUSH” designation for jobs as well. It didn’t take long after implementing the “RUSH” designation before every job we got was requested as a RUSH, despite the surcharge. If everything’s a RUSH, nothing’s a RUSH. :slightly_smiling_face:

[Bill_French]

Jeremy_Oglesby:

If everything’s a RUSH, nothing’s a RUSH.

Until such time as price consequences and PRIORITY RUSH takes precedence over the plain old RUSH!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

“This one’s an Ultra-mega-uber-super-we-really-mean-it-this-time-RUSH”

“Meh… add it to the stack”