Initiatives and Action items
Last updated
Last updated
While Scorecards will show you progress over time, Initiatives can help you coordinate your team members, prioritize tasks, and ensure that everyone is adhering to the same standards and meeting deadlines.
Initiatives allow you to prioritize specific rules within a Scorecard and set deadlines for higher priority tasks. Cortex will notify owners and team members when deadlines are approaching, so once you set up an Initiative, everything else is handled for you.
For example, your Scorecard may have a rule that measures whether each service has an on-call rotation configured through PagerDuty. To make sure that all services actually have active on-call rotations within 30 days, you could create an Initiative with a due date in 30 days, which will notify entity owners if they need to take action on their entities.
Initiatives offer a streamlined view into the most critical tasks, improving not just the efficiency of your team members, but the accountability of your teams as well.
Click Create Initiative in the upper right corner of the Initiatives page.
Choose the Scorecard that the Initiative is attached to.
Start configuring the form:
Name: Add a descriptive name.
Description: Enter a description to help make the Initiative's goal clear.
Notifications: Click the toggle to enable notifications for the Initiative's due date.
Configure how often to send progress notifications. You can also designate one or more reply-to email addresses.
Progress notifications can enhance both short-term and long-term Initiatives. For example:
Initiative owners can set daily progress notifications for short-term Initiatives so team members have clear goals each day for completing time-sensitive action items.
Initiative owners can set bi-weekly or monthly progress notifications for an ongoing, long-term Initiative so team members continue to make progress on action items over time.
Scorecard level: To satisfy level-based Initiative, owners must meet all of the rules for a level. This is a good option if your goal is to bump all entities up to a similar level on your ladder.
For example, to get all entities into a production-ready state, you might use a level-based Initiative to motivate your team to configure PagerDuty and add runbooks for every entity they own by the end of the quarter.
Rules: Choose this option to focus on specific rules. This may be a better option if you have targeted goals that your team needs to achieve.
For example, if most of your entities are already in a production-ready state, you might only need PagerDuty to be set up for some of your entities.
Under Due date, select a deadline for the Initiative.
If notifications are enabled, users will receive reminders of pending action items 7 days and 1 day before the due date. This date will also be reflected in action items on the dev homepage.
Under Apply to specific entities, add one or more entity types that this Initiative should apply to. If left blank, it will apply to all entities.
Optionally, click to expand Advanced options and further refine which entities this Initiative applies to. You can include or exclude groups, or add a CQL expression.
Choose whether to keep your Initiative in draft form, visible only to users with the Edit Initiatives permission.
To keep it in draft form, enable the toggle next to Save as draft.
Initiatives in draft status will not appear on entity pages or in actions on the dev homepage, and will not trigger notifications.
Click Create Initiative.
When you create an Initiative, all of the owners with outstanding action items will be notified by Cortex. Users who own an entity that's already met the rule or achieved the action item will not be notified. Those who own multiple entities will receive a notification outlining any entities with an outstanding action item.
The new Initiative will also appear on the Initiatives page.
To edit an Initiative:
Navigate to an Initiative page then click Edit in the upper right corner.
Make any desired changes.
At the bottom of the page, click Save Initiative.
To view Initiatives, navigate to Scorecards > Initiatives in the main nav.
By default, the page displays a list of active Initiatives at your organization, including their description, associated Scorecard, progress level, and deadline. To view expired Initiatives, click the Expired tab.
From the Initiatives list, click into an Initiative to view its details page.
By default, this page will open to the Failing tab, where you can see each entity's progress in the Initiative. Each row displays how many rules out of the total are passing for that entity. Click an entity to expand the view and see which rules are failing:
Once entities have completed all action items, they will appear under the Passing tab.
You can find all outstanding tasks for Initiatives related to entities you own on the Developer homepage under the Action items tab:
This tab lists the entity, the failing rule, the associated Scorecard or Initiative, the due date (if it's linked to an Initiative), and the priority based on Scorecard level.
By default, action items are sorted by priority level. Tasks with deadlines are sourced from Initiatives; those without deadlines are sourced from failing Scorecard rules.
In the upper right corner of the list, click Priority to choose a different sorting method. You can select priority, name, source, or rule.
To filter by Scorecard, Initiative, or group, click Filter.
To group actions by entity, click Display then enable the toggle next to Group by entity.
Grouping by entity gives a clearer view of how many tasks are associated with each entity, giving developers an easy target for improvements.
In the Initiative creation form under Define goal, select the level or rules to prioritize. The levels and rules available are based on the associated Scorecard.
