You'll work with your Sensei Labs Customer Success team to prepare a Playbook to be imported. Your Playbook, in turn, creates the Conductor hierarchy for a specific Initiative.

The Playbook contains the Conductor hierarchy from the Initiative-level down, which might look like this:

• Initiative: New Popsicles Brand Launch
• Workstream (Portfolio): Summer Marketing Campaign
• Project: Street Team Campaign
• Task: Get 300 t-shirts for customer giveaway

This article outlines the information you'll need to create your Playbook and where that information goes in the Playbook in two sections:

• Parts of the Playbook
• Tab structure

Parts of the Playbook

Business Units

Use Business Units to identify the hierarchical structure of your organization (e.g., departments, divisions, functional areas). Typically, you only need to set up one Business Unit with the same name as the Initiative that you’re configuring. However, if you need to make your Business Unit setup more robust, the Playbook allows for that.

For more information on Business Units in Conductor, click here.

Initiatives

Initiatives are the entire structure of your program and contain all of the elements of your work. An Initiative is also a collection of Workstreams. 

Initiatives often have a 1:1 relationship with Companies (or Divisions) set up in your configuration. If you set up Companies in the Workstream tab of your Playbook, the platform displays those Company names under the Initiatives label in Conductor:

Workstreams

A Workstream (or Portfolio) is a collection of Projects. Workstreams allow you more control and flexibility when setting up a program. Information is often summarized at the Workstream level.

Projects

A Project is a collection of Tasks, and usually has a Group that is responsible for completing it. However, some Tasks in that Project might be owned by other Groups or individuals.

Projects are the level at which data values are captured for data elements; an association that you’ll make in the Data Elements tab of the Playbook. Projects are also the main way that reporting is generated for Conductor since they can be attributed to a Workstream, Initiative, Group, Tag, and Project reviews.

Tasks

Tasks can be broken down into sub-tasks and checklist items, and are one of the smallest units of work in the Conductor hierarchy. 

In the Tasks tab, the Task ID column requires you to simply number all of the Tasks that you're importing via the Playbook. For example, if there are 50 Tasks in your Playbook, number the Tasks, 1-50 and don't exceed the number 50. The 1-50 numbers are not used, the platform will generate the Task IDs that it uses. This number is only to facilitate the import process.

Groups

Groups typically align with functional departments, like Marketing or Human Resources, and they are a way of categorizing team members who might be expected to complete certain Tasks. Groups are also often aligned to Workstreams as well. 

Tags

Tags are a way of organizing Projects into logical groups that can be reported on together, and they belong to tag categories. 

For example, two tag categories might be "product_type" and "product_stage" and they include the tags "frozen_desserts" and "launch" respectively.

Milestones

Milestones are a way of tracking the progress of multiple Tasks and Projects towards a common target date. You can set start dates and deadlines for Tasks that are relative to a milestone so that, if the milestone moves, all the Tasks move with it. Milestones can be tied to the Initiative, Workstream or Project level of the Conductor Hierarchy.

Data categories

Data categories are collections of data elements that can be aggregated together. However, data categories can have only one data element associated with them if it doesn’t make sense to aggregate it with other data elements.

Data elements

Data elements are specific metrics that a Project is measured against. Each data element belongs to a single data category and is tracked through a Project. 

Data elements typically have a target, a forecast, and an actual achieved value for each month that the Project is active. This allows data to be measured against specific expectations and reported on.

By associating a data element with a Project, you can review and update the target, forecast, and actual values periodically as part of the Project review process.

Tab structure