GIS Request Management: Effort filtering

Kara_Shindle

So we have deployed this in our County, and all program staff are now using. This was reviewed by Fiscal and we are in the process of rolling this out to replace the need for PARs (help us track grant work & allocation of our department as an IT Service.)

One of the issues the users have mentioned is that they would love to be able to see their effort. I am going to work on designing a dashboard that will do this, & I will post back on my results here.

The idea is that sometimes they need to search by the most recent effort they have entered to see if something has been entered. They also want to be able to filter activites based on activity within a certain period. This is useful when they need to answer questions about when work was completed - being able to look at everything they did two weeks ago (for people who do not have ArcPro) is useful to them.

It would also be useful to me as a manager so I can check in on the most recent activity to make sure everything is being entered as it should be.

This would also be helpful as anytime we open the GIS_Activites feature layer in ArcPro - it refreshes constantly (approx. every 10 seconds) and changing the refresh rate has not helped. Sorting & searching the attribute table is extremely difficult. A data view has not solved this issue, so we are looking for something that would be within the Request Management solution itself.

BrandiRank22 · ‎02-24-2025

Thanks @Kara_Shindle for the feedback!

The ability to find recent activity sounds pretty interesting and I can understannd how that would be helpful to individuals AND managers. I can't wait to see what you build.

I am going to add it to the list of ideas for V2 of the solution - our current plan it to evaluate feedback at the end of this year and determine if and when to upgrade the solution.

I don't think I was anticipating folks opening the GIS_Activities layer in ArcGIS Pro. I would be interested in hearing why you are doing this. After you updated the refresh rate I would expect it to have helped correct that issue - I will need to look into that more.

Kara_Shindle · ‎03-31-2025

Hi @BrandiRank22

So I've attached a an image of changes that have been requested or well received by staff using this. Because we're trying to get to 8 hours per day, I added in a chart that shows a Daily Effort Tally, along with a monthly effort tally.

Selecting an activity filters & shows all effort submitted for that time period selected in our "Effort Filter"

As for the Layer being updated in Pro - that was something our GIS users wanted to do - They wanted to use it to duplicate entries instead of retyping them. Editing the refresh rate did not help. I also had to perform a join to export it to Excel for our Fiscal department. I'm currently working on a script that will do the join, export the activities & effort for the previous month, and group by person. It will also call out specific projects they wanted "flagged" that are entered under grants or other revenue streams.

We also added an "Operational" category for status of things that take up time but aren't project related. It's been a revelation for our Administration this year that our division has so much going on "behind the scenes."

effort chart.png

Alex_755

My organization is getting ready to deploy GIS Request Management to assist with tracking projects and day-to-day GIS tasks.

For reference, my organization is deploying the solution on ArcGIS Enterprise 11.3.

The ability to track effort by when it was done would be a welcome addition to the solution. Another item I noticed is that the Planned Effort displays inconsistent behavior. The idea was to provide an estimate of how many hours would be allocated to a request and enable GIS staff to add effort/hours entries as they go using the "+" sign next to the Actual Effort field in the GIS Activities dashboard.

Screenshot 1: Add hours to an early task that has been completed to test/verify the display in the Effort Serial Chart item in the dashboard. Planned Effort: 2, Actual Effort: 1.25

Screenshot 2: Add 0.25 hours to account for brief follow up task with the GIS team. Planned Effort: 2 (unchanged); Actual Effort: add 0.25 hours using the "+" to add an entry. Planned Effort updated to 4 hours when refreshing the dashboard. Actual Effort: 1.5 hours (first entry + second entry).

Screenshot 3: As a test, add an entry to Actual Effort (0.25 hours) and enter zero (0) in Planned Effort to avoid adding the previous values together. Result: Planned Effort changed to zero (0), Actual Effort updated to 1.75 (1.25 + 0.25 + 0.25 = sum of first three entries)

I hope to see more robust tracking capabilities in the next release of the solution. The solution has some nice visualizations and it enables our users and GIS staff to submit/update entries directly in ArcGIS Enterprise.

Great ideas by @Kara_Shindle. Best of luck to your organization with GIS Request Management.

BrandiRank22

@Alex_755 - Please see this article for the resolution to your issue: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-solutions-blog/gis-request-management-error-in-gis-activities/b...

Alex_755

Hi @BrandiRank22

I appreciate the link to the resolution for this issue. Despite configuring several dashboards in the past, I am still new with GIS Request Management. I will be the first to admit that this may be a case of user error on my part. However, Planned Effort is still adding hours between entries even after executing the following steps outlined in the Community post from October 2024. https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-solutions-blog/gis-request-management-error-in-gis-activities/b...

- Remove the Serial Chart with Planned Effort and Actual Effort

- Add Indicator widgets for Planned Effort and Actual Effort

- Planned Effort indicator widget: Data Source = GIS Activities effort, Statistic = Sum, Field = Planned Effort

- GIS activities table (Actions tab): Toggle ON filter for Planned Effort Indicator. I tried setting the Source Field and Target Field to GlobalID and Planned Effort - same result.

- GIS Activities Number Selector widget > Planned Effort (in hours): Source Field is Planned Effort (grayed out, cannot be updated); Target Field = Planned Effort. Same result as setting Source Field and Target Field for the Table widget.

I have configured many dashboards, but I am still new with the GIS Request Management solution. Any feedback or guidance would be appreciated. In the meantime, I will continue playing with the configuration settings for Planned Effort.

BrandiRank22

@Alex_755 I apologize for sending you down that rabbit hole.

You wrote:

"Screenshot 3: As a test, add an entry to Actual Effort (0.25 hours) and enter zero (0) in Planned Effort to avoid adding the previous values together. Result: Planned Effort changed to zero (0), Actual Effort updated to 1.75 (1.25 + 0.25 + 0.25 = sum of first three entries)"

When you updated the planned effort to zero - that updated the planned effort to zero - so it's working correctly. And adding .25 hours to the acutal effort which ends with 1.75 is also correctly working.

Planned effort is not a sum, each activity can only have one planned effort value.
Actual effort is a sum of the entries - each activity could have 1 entry for actual effort or many.

Alex_755

@BrandiRank22 I appreciate the follow up. Good to know that changing the Planned Effort to zero (0) is working correctly.

- Actual Effort is works correctly in the Serial Chart or the Indicator.

- Planned Effort still has the same behavior as Actual Effort; it sums the total of each entry on a request except when entering zero (0) on an update.

If you have any ideas to make Planned Effort display more consistently, I am open to suggestions. Thank you for your support while my organizations gets ready to roll out GIS Request Management. 😀

BrandiRank22

@Alex_755 I would like to this resolved for you, I would like to get on a call with you if possible so we can get this figured out and resolved. Would you send me a direct message so we can set that up?