I was recently asked by a site management team if they should choose Issues over Actions for “on the floor” reporting. The two look identical with only a few differences (Assets in Actions, Labels in Actions vs. Issue category, recurring Action option, probing questions in Issues, Actions can come from Inspection vs. initiating inspection from Issues). The conclusion was that the notification feature when creating an Issue was powerful, and management can later determine if an Action follow up is necessary. However, Issues notifications has problems:
- Site is being forgotten because there is no option to require it (either globally or by category). This keeps notifications from happening and prevents access. We know notifications will go out later if you assign a site afterwards, but this isn’t usually caught right away if at all. So then the notifications are not timely.
- To more easily setup who needs to get notified for each category across each of our sites, I setup a group for each site (such as “Issues Property Damage Chicago”). Unfortunately, the message in the timeline then displays “A notification has been sent to members of SITENAME who are also in ALL GROUPS IN CATEGORY SETTING.”
- This list of groups is long in appearance.
- This list of groups is confusing to end users. I know there won’t be site-associated matches in most of the groups, but everyone else does not.
- Alternatively, I have switched to a single, combined group for all sites with everyone that needs to be notified for that Issue category at each site (such as “Issues Property Damage”). While that is less confusing to the end user, it is harder for me to manage because I can’t sort the groups by what site its members are in to provide that to their team or see who is in the group by site.
- The message in the timeline for automated notifications does not tell you who in those groups specifically matched being associated to the site selected. This leaves the end user wondering who was actually notified. I have to tell the management teams to train their people that it has been properly setup and just “trust that it works.”
- The “who should be notified about this issue” panel pops up immediately after reporting an issue. The timing of this panel is a bit odd, because you have not yet been prompted to answer the probing questions for the category, so a notification will go out before you even complete the reporting. The probing questions should come up first. Additionally, this panel floats over the timeline, so you can’t see the message about “a notification has been sent...” regarding the automated notifications. They end up selecting specific people to notify, not realizing some or all of them may have already gotten the notification automatically.
I’ve already reported a lot of Issue improvements that are necessary in another post (Make Reporting Issues Faster and More Informing | Community (safetyculture.com)), but this new post provides more detail surrounding notifications and access which is our first stumbling block.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but I wanted to report an update. We REALLY want to use Issues companywide. But these flaws with choosing a site, setting up notifications, and the interface regarding notifications when reporting an Issue are causing problems. I have 3 sites that are piloting Issues and a couple others dabbling, one of which is going strong on using them for everything. They are all struggling for several reasons, with notifications/sites being a big one.
Hey Corey, thanks a lot for all of the feedback.
I’m the Engineering Manager for the Incident Response team, which has recently taken over the Issues feature. I’m just now going through your posts and taking note of all of your ideas. I can see how the current feature would be somewhat limiting without what you are mentioning. I’ll try to get through all of your problems.
The mandatory site question is something that will take a bit more time to research, along with all other mandatory fields. The visual notification requests are something that we can look into a lot sooner.
I really appreciate the time you took to leave such valuable feedback and share your suggestions and requests with us. Your input is valuable to our team, as it helps us understand your needs better and make improvements to provide you with an even better experience.