About Job/Project Roles

Job/Project roles are used in SolarNexus as a means to consistently assign a set of tasks for a job to the same person. Typically Roles are used to maintain consistency and continuity across the jobs that your company

Jobs in SolarNexus have multiple role associations. Currently the names roles are:

• Owner - This is the assigned saleperson for Projects, and the responsible owner for Work Orders.
• Sales Assistant -
• Engineer/Designer - Person responsible for creating engineering plans.
• Project Manager - Person typically responsible for managing multiple
• Foreman - Person responsible for installation of the project in the field.
• Site Surveyor

A job/project role can be assigned to specific individuals in your company, and subsequently used to assign milestones/tasks to whoever is playing a given role on each job. For example:

Let's take, for example, the case where you want one person called a "Project Manager" to handle all of the following process steps for a given project:

1. Apply for Interconnection
2. Verify Materials are On-Hand
3. Confirm Installation Date
4. Get AHJ Approval
5. Get PTO
6. Complete Project

In your job process, you would assign all of these milestones to "Project Manager".

But for this to work, you must first assign someone on your team to be the Project Manager on each job BEFORE its time to start the "Apply for Interconnection" milestone. SolarNexus provides a way to automatically assign a team member to the role on each job/project.

Assigning Roles

There are two ways to assign users to roles on a specific project, manually or automatically. SolarNexus strongly recommends using automated role assignments for most cases, while using manual assignment features to make adjustments to workload for your team.

Automatically Assign Roles

On completion of a milestone, SolarNexus can automatically add users to a job in a given role. You can think of it like "Once this milestone is completed, add someone to the job in the role of X." If you want to assign someone playing a given role to a group of milestones in a process, you must FIRST ensure that you assign someone to that role. You do this by using the "Assign Role on Completion of Milestone" feature.

You can apply business rules to determine which specific user is assigned to a given role on a job. For example, let's say that you wanted to assign a project manager to each job based on the state in which the job will be installed. You can define these rules:

This is configured on the milestone definition screen.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• Once a user is assigned to a job/project role, that user will remain in that role on that job. DO NOT use the Assign Project Roles on Completion feature again on ANY OTHER MILESTONE unless you explicitly want to change the person assigned to the role.
• IF a project role was previously assigned to a different user, you can use the "Override any existing role name" checkbox. Otherwise, if the role is already assigned, a new user will NOT replace the user currently assigned to the role.

To summarize this example:

1. Edit the "Close Final Sale" milestone, configure the "Assign Project Role on Completion" feature to assign the Project Manager role based on the state in which the job is located.
2. Edit each of the milestones that should be assigned to the Project Manager. Select "[Project Manager]" from the Assign To drop-down.
3. Immediately after the "Close Final Sale" milestone is completed, SolarNexus will evaluate the rule(s) and assign the defined team member to the job based on that job's state.
4. When the job proceeds to a milestone assigned to the Project Manager, the user playing that role on the job/project will be automatically assigned responsibility for that milestone.

Behavior Notes: Auto-assigning sales owner on Lead Creation

Lead creation is a special case of auto assignment. The lead is created upon user clicking Save on new lead form. If the user creates a lead and the Lead Created milestone is set to automatically assign a sales owner on creation of the lead, the user inputting the lead could be restricted from accessing the lead they just created (would no longer have ownership). So SolarNexus implements behavior to allow automated assignment of a Sales Owner while allowing the user entering the lead to continue to have access to enter more data (on Project and Energy Use screens).

The following describes the behavior that SolarNexus takes when this occurs:

First, we have the Lead Created milestone configured to auto-assign Sales Owner of new leads to User X when lead is created.

SolarNexus expects that in some cases a manually set Sales Owner cannot be overriden by the milestone configuration. When a user with global sales manager or administrative permissions creates a lead, that user may override the default user that the milestone configuration would assign as Sales Owner. Users with basic permissions cannot override the configuration in the Lead Created milestone UNLESS that user has Workgroup Manager permissions. In that case the user may override the default Sales Owner by picking any member of his group, including himself.

The following scenarios detail this...

Scenario 1: User A with basic user permissions manually creates a lead
* Lead is created with User X as the Sales Owner
* User A is assigned to the Sales Assistant role- giving them continued access to edit the project lead

Scenario 2: User B with administrative (or global sales management) permissions creates new lead, assigns to self
* Lead is created with User B as the Sales Owner
* Manual assignment by user with administrative permissions overrides the Sales Owner specified on the milestone form

Scenario 3: User B with administrative (or global sales management) permissions creates new lead, assigns Sales Owner to [unassigned]
* Lead is created with User X as Sales Owner as per the milestone configuration
* User B is NOT added as Sales Assistant (since User B has administrative permissions giving him access to all projects already)

Scenario 4: User C with basic permissions and workgroup management permissions creates new lead, assigns Sales Owner to any member of his workgroup (including himself or the workgroup itself)
* Lead is created with the specified workgroup member (or workgoup itself) as the Sales Owner
* User C retains project access as workgroup manager for Sales Owners

Manually Assign Roles

You can set or change individual project roles for a given project from the Responsibilities section of a project's Management Panel.

Batch Assign Project Roles

There are many times you need to change the users assigned to a whole set of project roles, such as when a particular employee leaves the business and you need to remove that user.

You can batch assign, or re-assign users to project roles from the Sales or Installs screen. For example, maybe a sales person has left the company and you want to re-assign the Sales Ownership of that person's projects prior to deactivating that user. Simply go to the Sales screen and use the filters to show the projects currently owned by the exiting sales person. Check the boxes of the projects that you want to re-assign to a specific user. Then click the Change Roles button (see below).

The dialog shown below will appear, allowing you to set specific user(s) to the selected project's roles.