Rolling out Wrangle to your Workspace

This guide for workflow admins covers how to get buy-in from other teams when implementing your workflows.

More likely than not, you’ve experienced a painful or inefficient process within your company that led you to checking Wrangle out. Take a moment to reflect on what made it painful. Maybe it’s that colleagues request help via DM or one-off requests in noisy channels, and it’s hard to keep track of those requests. Maybe you and your team have to spend extra time rerouting those requests because people aren’t sure who to reach out to. No matter the cause, your colleagues making these requests probably don’t intend to create friction or make your job harder, so we’ll walk you through how to get their buy-in on your new workflow(s).

To start, choose a key workflow that will solve one of those major pains for your team. Then, plan a meeting to collaboratively map out your workflow with the stakeholders who will also be involved. Read on to learn about this meeting and workflow mapping exercise.

Meeting roles:

You: Meeting driver
Workflow Owner/SME: Could be you, or could be someone else from your team who is familiar with the ins and outs of how this workflow should function. This person will build the workflow in Wrangle and should be able to articulate what your team needs from the requesters.
Requester Stakeholders: Those who manage and/or influence the teams affected by this workflow. They will provide input on the workflow itself, as they and their teams will be the primary users of this workflow.

Meeting agenda:

Explain the pain: Tell this group the “why” behind your need for Wrangle workflows.
Quick explanation of Wrangle (see these slides to add to your deck)
Collaborative whiteboard exercise: map out a workflow together. We’ve created this template to help, but you could also use an actual whiteboard or any virtual collaboration tool.
Create a rollout timeline and plan

Before your meeting:

You and your workflow owner/SME should map out your ideal version of the workflow (you can even build it out in Wrangle!), but don’t share it with your stakeholders. You want to be able to guide the whiteboarding exercise towards your ideal process, but don’t just put it up in front of everyone: everyone will collaborate better if you’re building it out as a team. And by getting your stakeholders involved in the whiteboarding exercise, you’ll have these added benefits:

They’ll understand the inner workings of this workflow and why it is the way that it is, and can articulate the benefits to their teams
You might get some insight into your blind spots about the requesters’ POV and needs

Facilitator's guide for workflow whiteboarding exercise

Template
Question 1: What data is needed from the requester in order to effectively complete these requests? (This will be your intake form)
- Additional discussion points: how difficult it is for requesters to provide that data, and what are the potential tradeoffs between asking for more up front, or making the intake form simpler to submit?
Question 2: Does anyone need to approve these requests? If so, who? One person, or a number of people? How quickly does it need to be approved? (This will be an approval step where applicable)
Question 3: Once a request is submitted, what are the action items, and who owns them? How quickly do they need to be done once a request is submitted? (this will be a task list step where applicable). Are there any dependencies, like “task C can’t be done until tasks A and B are complete?” If so, Task C should be a separate step after Tasks A and B.
- Additional discussion points: what is a reasonable expectation for approval/task turnaround? Not everyone is glued to Slack, and if your stakeholders are expecting immediate results, temper their expectations early so they understand how much time your team needs to manage these requests.

Once you’ve completed mapping out your workflow collaboratively, you and the Workflow Owner/SME can set a timeline for when you think your new workflow will be ready and share it with your stakeholders.

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Last updated 2 years ago

Facilitator's guide for workflow whiteboarding exercise

Template

Question 1: What data is needed from the requester in order to effectively complete these requests? (This will be your intake form)

Additional discussion points: how difficult it is for requesters to provide that data, and what are the potential tradeoffs between asking for more up front, or making the intake form simpler to submit?

Question 2: Does anyone need to approve these requests? If so, who? One person, or a number of people? How quickly does it need to be approved? (This will be an approval step where applicable)

Question 3: Once a request is submitted, what are the action items, and who owns them? How quickly do they need to be done once a request is submitted? (this will be a task list step where applicable). Are there any dependencies, like “task C can’t be done until tasks A and B are complete?” If so, Task C should be a separate step after Tasks A and B.

Additional discussion points: what is a reasonable expectation for approval/task turnaround? Not everyone is glued to Slack, and if your stakeholders are expecting immediate results, temper their expectations early so they understand how much time your team needs to manage these requests.