Tasking in SurveyToGo

Overview

In this manual we will learn how to work with the STG Task System and will cover the following topics:

• Overview
• Project Locations
• Creating and Assigning Tasks
• Working with tasks in the field
• Managing tasks
• Accessing location properties from within the survey logic

Online Videos 

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Direct Youtube link (for full screen): https://youtu.be/plbrB0Yt-Ps 

Task System Overview

SurveyoToGo includes a task assignment system to assist customers in creating and assigning tasks to their field surveyors. Tasks consist of which survey to conduct at which location and by whom. Once you work with the task system, the SurveyToGo data collection clients show the “tasks” system to the surveyors instead of the regular ad-hoc surveying option.

Locations
The task system works with locations. Locations are the places where surveys are to be conducted at. For example, locations can be stores, houses, office branches etc. Each location should have a unique identifier – a code – which the system can identify it by and a friendly name that the surveyor will see.

Task batches
A batch of tasks represents a group of tasks that you can reference. You can create a monthly batch of tasks or a weekly one or however you would like to group tasks.

Task Assignments

Each task has a location assigned to it. Once you assign a surveyor to the task it becomes “assigned” and the surveyor in the field will see this task. The task console is used to manage the tasks and task batches:

Project Locations

The task system is based on locations. You will need to create an excel file that holds the project locations which can be stores or office branches or whatever locations you will need to conduct interviews at. Each location needs to have a unique identifier – a code – and a friendly name. The code will be used by SurveyToGo internally to reference the location and the friendly name will be used when showing the location to the surveyor.

Loading the locations into SurveyToGo from Excel

To start you will need an excel roughly resembling this one:

To load this file:

1. Drill down to the relevant customer and to the locations node:
   
2. Right click the locations node and click the “Add locations”:
   
3. If you already have a location file loaded which you want to re-use, you can select it from the list, to load a new location file, click the “New Location” button:
   
4. Then click the “Browse” button to locate your excel file and then the “Import” button to load it:
   
5. After import, make sure the ID column is identified as the “user tag” (unique id) and that the friendly name column is identified as the “Is Name” column:
   
   If this is not the case click the appropriate ID column and select the Tag and name fields accordingly.
6. Now, just give the new locations list a new and click the “Create” Button:
   
7. You should see the “Success” message:
   
8. Click OK and then select the newly created locations list and click the OK button:
   
9. You should now see the new “Acme Inc stores” list appear under the locations node:
   

Managing the list of locations

You can manage the list of locations by double clicking the location node:

This will bring up the locations edit screen:

You can edit and then save the changes by clicking the “Save” button on the bottom-right corner

You can also overwrite an entire list of locations all at once from an excel file by right clicking on the location node and clicking the “replace locations” option:

Linking a project to a list of locations

Different projects can be linked to different locations of a single customer. It is therefore necessary to link a project to its relevant location list. To do so you will need to right click the project node and select “general settings”:

Then select from the drop-down list the relevant location list of this customer:

Finally, click the “Refresh” option to make sure the project is refreshed:

Please note this is a one way operation. Once you have completed this, the project is bound to this location list and while the content of the location list can be modified as much as needed, the structure of the location list must remain the same.

Creating & Assigning Tasks

A task is dependent on both a location and a surveyor. Once its assigned to both the task is considered assigned and a surveyor can start working on it. Tasks are grouped together into batches to help you manage them.

Creating a batch of tasks

You can either manually create a new batch of tasks or load a predefined batch of tasks from excel. To manually create a new batch of tasks:

1. Drill to the “Batches” node under the “Assignments” node of the project and double click it:
   
2. Click the “New Batch” button, and the wizard will come up:
    

   Give a name to the batch, for example: January tasks and click the Next button:
   

3. Change the default values if necessary, if you would like the tasks created to start immediately you will need to modify the default start date to be today:
     
4. If you already have a task assignment excel ready you can select to “import from excel” otherwise, just click next to manually select the locations you would like to create tasks for in this batch of tasks:
     
5. Select the relevant locations that should be surveyed in this batch of tasks. A task will be created for each of these locations:
    
6. Click the Finish button to generate the batch of tasks:
    
7. If you would like to continue directly to assign the surveyors of each task, click the “Yes”:
     

Assigning tasks to surveyors

Once you have created a batch of tasks, you can go to the tasks console and start assigning the newly created tasks to your various surveyors. To do this:

1. Double click the “Tasks” node to bring up the task management console:
    
2. To see all the tasks, De-Select the “Completed Date” and “Due Date” filters:
   
   Then click the “Get” button: 
    
3. Select one or more tasks (use the CTRL key to select multiple tasks) and click the “Assign” button: 
     
4. Choose the relevant surveyor you would like to assign to this task and click the OK button:
     
5. The color and status of this task will now change to “Assigned”:
   

Assigning tasks from excel

Instead of manually assigning tasks to surveyors, you can create batches of pre-assigned tasks directly from excel. To load a task list:

1. Start the create batch wizard as shown in the previous section do but when you get to the “Select Create Mode” screen – choose “Import from excel” and click Next:
    
2. Choose the file that contains the pre-assigned tasks in excel. The format of the excel (column names and order) is strict. To have SurveyToGo create an empty file for you to fill, you can click the “Create new file” button:
   
   The file should be in the following format:  
   

   and the only columns that are not optional are the “LocationCode” and “SurveyorName” columns. The other columns can be left blank and the defaults will be used instead. Here is a description of the columns:

 Click the “Finish” button to create the batch with the pre-assigned tasks:

You can then use the tasks management console to view the pre-assigned tasks

Working with Tasks in the Field

Once you start working with the task system, your surveyors will need to switch to the “Tasks” view of the data collection clients. This will bring up a dedicated screen that shows the surveyor all of his tasks and including an option to start a task and to add comments.

Viewing tasks in the SurveyToGo clients

To view the tasks assigned to a surveyor you will need to login to that relevant client. We will use the PC client as an example:

1. Login to SurveyToGo:
   
2. If you have tasks assigned to you, you will immediately be redirected to the tasks screen:
   
3. Before starting a Task you can choose to 'Accept Task' - This will acknowledge that surveyor has seen the task without starting to conduct the interview, Once sync will occur the Task status will be changed to 'In Progress' and the Project Manager will have more control over things happening in the field.
    
4. Another option that you have is to 'Request Cancel' - This will send a request to the project manager to cancel the task due to any reason he will document when cancelling. Only when the project manager will change the status to 'Cancelled' then the task will be removed from the surveyors list on the device, until he does this task will be shown as 'Request Cancel'
   
   
   
5. To start a task, simply double click that task and click the Start button:
   
   You can also choose to add a comment to the task before or after starting it.
6. While conducting the survey you have an option to 'Reset Subject Task' which will delete the current conducted interview from the device and will allow the surveyor to start a new interview.
    
7. Once you finish a task it will be removed from your list.

Managing Tasks

To manage the progress of tasks you can use the tasks console. From there you can both view the progress of tasks, read comments and also work directly on the data. To manage tasks:

1. Double click the “Tasks” node to bring up the task management console:
   
2. You can now see completed and not completed tasks:
   
3. If you double click on a task, you can view the task details along with the ability to view the actual interview data:
   
   By clicking the “Review observation” you can drill down to the interview data:
   
4. If you need to re-assign the task to a different surveyor you can do that as well in addition to the ability to add comments and change status:
   

Accessing location properties from within the survey logic

When designing your survey, you can access any column of the locations data and integrate that information into the question text, answer text or rules. An example of when this comes in handy:

• To display some of the location data on the first question for verification purposes.
• Showing the location name from within a question
• Use skip rules or branch rules that depend on some of the current location properties.

How does the integration work

For example, say your location data looks like the following:

And I would like to show on the first question of the survey, the store name and area name of the store that this surveyor needs to survey (assuming I allocated this locations as tasks to the surveyors of course). Something like this:

To do this, I would simply add an “Empty” type question to the survey and in the question text put:

Notice that {0} will be replaced by the store name and the {1} by the area name. To instruct SurveyToGo to replace these with the right values you will need to switch to the “Scripts” tab of this question and write the following:

The “SetTextFormat” function replaces the {0} and {1} strings in the question with the the StoreName column value and the AreaName column value of the current location.

Just save and sync this survey and you will see that the location data is displayed. Please note you can use any column of the location table and in any question or answer of the survey.

Customized Task Filters

Once a surveyor logs in to the device he is able to filter the tasks to show only the tasks he needs, he can filter either by Dates, Status, Location Name/ID etc. 

You can add additional customized Filters based on your locations files as follows:

1. Make sure your location has the column that you would like to filter by - for example: Region

2. Navigate to the organization name, right click and choose 'Edit Location Props..'

3. In the following screen click on 'Add Property' - Fill in the Property name, code & type and click 'Save'

4. Property will be added

5. Right click the location store -> modify -> click on the column -> set the location prop. 

6. Now when the surveyor will login to the device and click on 'Filter Tasks' the new property will be added as an option 

That's It !