Create and Edit an Activity for an Engagement Plan

An activity groups together stakeholders with whom your organization must communicate on a regular basis, using the same strategy, and within the same time frame. For example, a group of stakeholders to whom your organization wants to talk to regarding a specific initiative once per month, for the next 12 months.

In addition to linking your stakeholders to your initiative, activities create all the follow-ups tasks, which will be assigned to selected team members.

Activities are a sub-section of engagement plans: they help users implement their strategy according to the overall plan, predetermined objectives, targeted stakeholder groups and specific time periods. Activities make it possible for users to precisely monitor and track the progress of their engagement plans.

Create an Activity

1. Navigate to Engagement plans in Stakeholder Engagement.
2. Open the engagement plan for which you want to create an activity.
3. In the left hand record menu, expand the Planning menu.
4. Select Activities.
5. Use the in-line Add button in the left hand record menu 
   Or click the Add button in the upper left corner of the Activities page.
6. Fill in the fields in the Create an activity form.
   We suggest that you fill in as much information as possible so that team members collaborating can better understand context, scope  and guidelines of the engagement plan.
   There are 3 required fields: Title; Objectives; Start date.
   You need to add an End date to be able to start the activity.
   You can also flag Add multiple periods to add additional periods.
7. Click the Save button.

Access an Activity to Specify Additional Information

Each activity has its own records and needs to have additional information specified after its creation so that it can be used by your team.

1. Navigate to Engagement plans in Stakeholder Engagement.
2. Open the engagement plan with an activity for which you want to specify additional information.
3. In the left hand record menu, Expand the Planning menu.
4. Select Activities.
5. Open the activity for which you want to specify information.

To return to the engagement plan, go to the General information page and click on the engagement plan name.

Set a Period for your Activity

To be able to begin an activity, you need to add a communication period to the activity. This defines when the activity will be active.

1. Navigate to General information in the left hand record menu.
2. Click the + (Add) icon in the Period section of the page to add a new period.
3. Fill in the field in the Add - Periods form.
   The Start and End date fields are used to define the period during which your activity will be active.
4. Click the Save button.

Note: Periods cannot overlap in an Activity as there can only be one active period at any time.

Add Stakeholders to Your Activity

To be able to start an activity, you need to add stakeholders who should be contacted in regard to this activity. This then creates tasks for which follow-ups can be entered.

1. Navigate to Stakeholders in the left hand record menu.
2. Click the in-line + (Add) icon to add a new period
   OR click the + (Add) icon in the Stakeholders page.
3. Fill in the field in the Add - Stakeholders form.
   The Starting period field determines for which period the tasks will be created.
4. Click the Save button.

Note that you can also use the Start activity options from the Actions menu of the General information page to add a stakeholder in the Start activity form.

Assign a Responsible Person to a Stakeholder

After adding your stakeholders, you can specify a responsible person for contacting a stakeholder. This lets you assign different people on your team to contact different stakeholders.

You can also select multiple people using the Stakeholders page menu.

1. Navigate to Stakeholders in the left hand record menu.
2. Mouseover the stakeholder to which you want to assign a responsible person and click the Ellipsis (...) menu.
3. Select Assign.
4. Use the Responsible person drop-down list to assign a resource to contact that person.
5. Click the Assign button.

Note that when assigning a responsible person, they will need to have user accounts to receive notifications of assignments. If they do not have a user accounts, they will need to be notified with tools outside of Borealis.

Workflow of your Activity

Starting the activity will generate tasks for each Stakeholders added to this activity.

When creating a new activity, its status is automatically set to Not started.

You can manually change the status of an activity using the Actions menu.

Enter a Follow-up for a Stakeholder

You can enter follow-ups for a particular stakeholder to keep a record of all up-to-date communications and notes.

Note that communications entered in the system for a stakeholder of this engagement plan can be viewed in Engagements of the left hand record menu.

1. Navigate to Stakeholders in the left hand record menu.
2. Mouseover the stakeholder to which you want to assign a responsible person and click the Enter follow-up.
3. Specify information regarding the follow-up and fill in the fields.
4. Click the Enter button.

Follow-up information will then be available in Follow-up in the left hand record menu.