Planning Workspaces

[Sabrina Sampey]

What are Workspaces?
Workspaces are collections of curated, task-based workflows which empower users to complete their work easily and effectively. Workspace product types enable specific personas to perform complex work quickly, efficiently and with ease.

Workspace today includes modules for Agent and Manager Workflows, and more are in development. You may find these modules are right for your users and adopt them for your Workspace.  

Planning Workspaces
To plan Workspaces, it’s critical to map users, their jobs, and tasks to identify similarities and differences. It's also critical to identify if you need a whole Workspace, and if you can reuse modules across Workspaces.Here are some steps to help you achieve this:

1. List all users.
2. List specific jobs and tasks that users will undertake. 
3. Map out the users, their jobs, and tasks to identify similarities and differences.
4. Determine which modules are shared among users and which modules are unique to individual users.
5. Determine which modules are necessary and prioritize the modules in order of importance to the users
   
   

Some users may need different contexts within a shared module to support their specific work. To address this, pages within shared modules can be modified to present different information, views or roll-ups by using page variants in UIB. 


Outcomes

• Identify where whole Workspaces are necessary.
• Identify which modules might be shared amongst users.
• Identify modules that can be reused for that workflows where users share a set of jobs and tasks.
• Creation of Workspace that may apply to multiple users if they have all the same modules

Prerequisites

• Understanding the specific jobs and tasks that a user will undertake.

Example: Sports ball Here is a hypothetical example for a sportsball team: 

You can easily see that review plays module can be reused for both the player and the coach Workspaces. Additionally, review games and statistics module can be reused within the Workspaces for players, coaches and owners.

To cover those needs, perhaps with specific configurations or page variants to provide coaches or owners with a team-wide view of certain statistics. Other unique modules may only serve a single need and exist in that user’s Workspace. 

Based on this, these 4 Workspaces might be composed as shown below. If the trainer needs only a single module to do their job, the Trainer Workspace probably does not need a home page or module navigation. 

While we’ve left it out of this exercise, most Workspaces also include a home page. Home pages are not required but can help give the user immediate access to their most relevant tasks and information upon logging in. This allows the user to jump into specific modules to complete their workflows.

Example: ITSM
Of course, not all users and Workspaces will be this clear cut. Even in this over-simplified example of ITSM Workspaces there are plenty of questions for the product team to evaluate: 

Should the module supporting agents triaging incidents be the same as the module supporting agents resolving incidents, since only that user will be using them both? Many managers set schedules for their team but also resolve incidents if necessary.

Some managers may also review the team's performance against KPIs. How should these be combined into a single Workspace? (Currently, Manager Workspace includes the same Lists module from Agent Workspace to for users with this mixed role.) 

Product marketing, "go to market" plans, release timelines, engineering effort, available components and platform capabilities can also affect the team’s decision.

Once you understand the types of modules your users will need in their Workspace you can begin to design for Workspace.

Additional resources

Workspace foundations

Workspace Resources

Contributors: Dan Defenbaugh