Best Practices for WorkBook System Administrators

Both Natasha and I worked as System Administrators for several years in the advertising industry. Given that, we know how important it is to configure your system so you can easily convey your operations and financial storyline, make changes, stay in the know on the latest bug fixes, features, and enhancements, and act as the effervescent product cheerleader. It's a constant juggling act, and because our feet have been in your proverbial shoes, we get it, and we're here to take you on a System Administrator's journey

You've all been at the first step of the journey, setting up your system - ensuring that you have the right company and system variables set up and that users know how to navigate My Settings to customize their WorkBook experience. Beyond these areas, you'll want to localize your system. We're not talking about just VAT vs. Sales Tax vs. Canadian Tax (although those examples matter); we're talking about what processes should you be considering for each of the companies within your system?

1. The first step of the process also involves ensuring that you are on the up and up on all of the latest training opportunities, for example, Deltek University, WorkBook Online Help, Customer Care KB Articles, and the new WorkBook Product Portal. New content is added all of the time - make sure that your teams know how to find it.
   
   
2. The second step of the Systems Administrator's journey revolves around visibility - this is critical to ensuring that only the right individuals have access to information. This includes sensitive information such as social security numbers, Tax IDs, and employee costing data. You never want an employee to be able to back of the napkin calculate how much another employee makes. What information do you want to show, or hide? Consider recent enhancements including the ability to be able to anonymize suppliers and clients, in addition to employees, hiding rate and billable target cost per hour on resources, and limit access to those sensitive areas. Access rights and roles, in addition, to report profile review, especially for those reports that contain sensitive data, is important.
   
   
3. The third step of the journey, which sets the tone for how your employees engage with the system is onboarding. How are you onboarding your employees, suppliers, clients, debtors, and creditors? Consider setting up a digital form for each so you don't second-guess what needs to be included. What's your process around storing MSA's, key pieces of information, and credit limits? These are just some of the areas that you'll want to consider.
   
   
4. It doesn't take an annual audit to know how important step four of your journey is. It's a laundry list of housekeeping items that you should look at on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and/or annual basis. This includes how frequently you have updated resources including prospects, employees, clients, suppliers, creditors, debtors, GL accounts, closing out jobs and projects, updating price lists, employee rates, capacity profiles, addresses, prospects, and more. As the Systems Administrator, you are the gatekeeper for data integrity.
   
   
5. For the fifth step of the journey, we're looking for total systems evolution. Are there modules that you've been curious about but aren't using? Is it time to add the CRM module? What about the upcoming BI integration? This speaks to the fact that as you grow, we want to grow with you. This includes reviewing variables and agents, revisiting integrations, and of course testing, testing, and more testing on your demo environments.

To help you achieve a total system evolution, we have the right training resources as outlined earlier in the article, and of course the best customer care team to answer all your burning questions. Additionally, if you aren’t currently a member of the Customer Advisory Council, we encourage you to join.