Initiatives

This page provides an overview of what initiatives are and how to create, update, and use them. This article contains the following sections:

• Overview
• Creating an Initiative
• Building Initiatives
• Managing Initiatives

Overview

Initiatives allow you to execute process changes fast by visualizing your work, organizing scope, and adding context-rich documentation to every field, object, and automation. It's a great way to detail, manage and track a project, ongoing tasks, or assign work that needs to be done.

Unlike stand-alone documents or systems, initiatives allow you to organize the scope of fields, objects, and automation alongside your notes and documents to easily account for every dependency before making a single change. Once you add metadata to the scope of an initiative, it will show there even if that piece of metadata is deleted in Salesforce, allowing you to have referenceable documentation. 

Working with Initiative

Creating An Initiative

Initiatives can be created from the initiatives' home page or directly from any card in Sonar.

• Creating an Initiative from a Card:
• Creating an Initiative from the Initiatives List:

When you click on Create Initiative, you'll be prompted to add a name, then click the blue plus, and a new Initiative will be added. 

Building Initiatives

Now that your Initiative has been created you can assign an owner, add a description, add links to external systems, attach files, create tasks, and add scope. 

Owner

Set the owner of an Initiative by clicking the dropdown under "Owned By" on the Initiative detail screen. By default, the initiative is assigned to the Sonar user that created the Initiative. The owner can be changed at any time. 

Description

The description of an Initiative is commonly used to provide context and details to a project. As a best practice, we recommend adding enough detail to the description so that way any user in Sonar can quickly grasp why this Initiative occurred or what the goals were.  

External Links and Attached Files

Add external links and attach files to add more references and context to your Initiative. Files that are attached to an Initiative in Sonar are available for download at any point. You can update or delete any attached file or external link by expanding the items then by clicking on the trash can or pencil icons.

Tasks

Tasks enable you to break down the Initiative into actionable steps. Tasks can also serve as a valuable placeholder for more notes. As you get further along in your Initiative you can also mark tasks complete in order to show progress and track what has been completed. You can create, update, and delete tasks. 

Scope

You can add metadata to an Initiative as Scope. Any object, field, automation, or report can be added to Initiative as Scope. Adding scope to an initiative is a great way to clearly see or show which objects, fields, or automations are involved in a specific change. From the initiative, you can also drill into the scope and see exactly what references each piece of metadata has before making a change.

Once you've added scope to an initiative, you can then add the metadata to a task. 

• Adding Metadata to the Scope of an Initiative 

• Adding Scope to specific Tasks

Managing Initiatives

Once your Initiative is set up and ready to start, you can update the status, add comments or add and remove scope or tasks as the Initiative progresses. 

Comments

As you work through an Initiative you can comment and tag other Sonar users. Only the person who added the comment can edit or delete it.

When you tag a user they will get an email notification, as long as their email notifications are enabled, and an in-app notification showing your comment and the title of the initiative.  Comments you've been tagged in will show on the dashboard or when you click on the bell icon. 

• Tagging a user: "@{first name last name}"
• When viewing in-app notifications from the dashboard all new messages will be highlighted. If you click on the Notification title you will be brought directly to the Initiative where the comment was made. 
  
  

Status

The status of an Initiative is there to ensure your team is on the same page with what is being worked on. An Initiative can have 5 different statuses; New, Ready, In Progress, Testing, and Finished. The status does not control or impact the Initiative tasks or scope. 

Archiving

If you no longer wish to see or have any record of an Initiative then you should Archive it. In order to archive an initiative, open the initiative you'd like to archive and click the "..." button in the top right corner then select "Archive Initiative". 

If you accidentally archived an initiative and need to get it back, please contact [e-mail]