What To Ask Your Administrator For

A great deal of what you might want changed in your application is not yours to change — but it is somebody's. Screens, columns, filters, buttons, dashboards, access and even whether a field can be found by search were all decided when your application was set up, and they can be decided differently.

This chapter is a catalog of those things. For each one it says what to ask for and what to include, so the request can be acted on rather than sent back with questions.

Who You Are Actually Asking

Depending on your organization this person might be called the administrator, the application owner, the implementer, or, informally, "the person who set this up". What matters is that they can change the configuration of your application. Your IT helpdesk usually cannot — they look after computers and networks, not this application's contents.

There is one exception worth knowing: if icons are missing, date pickers have turned into plain boxes, charts are blank or the upload button does nothing, that is a network problem and the helpdesk is the right place. See When Something Goes Wrong.

How To Write A Request That Gets Done

The single most useful thing you can do is describe the job, not only the change. "Add a Days Overdue column" tells someone what to build. "I chase unpaid invoices every Monday and I have to work out the age of each one by hand" tells them what you need, and they may know a better way to give it to you.

A request that rarely comes back with questions contains:

What I am trying to achieve:
The screen (and the saved view, if any):
An example record where you can see the problem:
How often I do this:
Who else needs it:
How I work around it today:

Two more things help more than people expect:

• Copy the address from the address bar while you are looking at the screen in question. It carries the exact filters and view you are describing.
• Say whether it is blocking you or annoying you. Both are legitimate; they get prioritized differently.

Access

Ask when: you cannot see a screen, a record, a column or a button that you need for your job, and Why Your Screen Differs From A Colleague's has not explained it.

"I need to see the Supplier records for the purchasing work I have taken over from Jana. I can see Purchase Orders but the Supplier link on them takes me to a page that says I do not have permission."

Include: what you need to do, the name of a colleague who already has that access if you know one, and whether you need to change things or only to read them. That last distinction genuinely matters — read-only access is usually far easier to grant.

A whole area missing from your menu may be a role, or it may be a capability that has not been switched on for your application at all. You cannot tell which from the outside, so describe what you were expecting to find rather than naming the cause.

Note that you will not normally be told who else has access, and your profile page does not list the roles you hold. Describe the work, not the permission.

Screens, Columns And Layouts

A column that is not in the Available list. If a piece of information is on the record but you cannot add it as a column, it either was not made available as a column or your role cannot see that field.

"On the Orders list I would like a column showing the customer's account manager. I can see it when I open each order, but it is not in the Columns picker."

A different layout for a data set. The same records can be presented as a table, cards, a board or a calendar, but a screen normally offers only the one it was built with.

"The Tasks screen is a table. For the daily stand-up a board grouped by status would be much more useful. Could we have a board as an alternative view of the same tasks?"

Splitting a heavy screen. If a screen is slow or times out, the durable fix is usually to break it into smaller, purpose-built screens rather than to make one screen do everything. See Large Lists And Performance, and include the numbers listed there.

Sorting that is not offered. Some columns cannot be sorted because of how they are put together. If you regularly need a list in that order, say so — there is often a way to make it sortable.

Saved Views

You can save your own views, and mark one as your personal default for a screen. Putting a view in front of your whole team is a separate permission: unless your role has been given it, everything you save stays private to you.

"I have a private saved view called 'Overdue, unassigned' on the Tickets screen. The whole support team uses the same filters every morning — could it be made available to everyone with the Support role, so nobody has to rebuild it?"

Also worth asking for:

• a saved view being offered on a screen where the switcher does not currently list it
• the description on a shared view being filled in, so people know what it filters

See Saved Views.

Filters

A field you cannot filter on. Not every field is offered in the filter list.

"I need to filter Contacts by their region. Region shows on the contact but is not in the list of available filters."

A ready-made filter control. If you set the same conditions every single day, they can often be turned into a one-click control that sits on the screen next to the Filter button.

"Every morning I filter Orders to 'created today, not yet confirmed'. Could that be a one-click button on the screen?"

A shared list of values. If you routinely filter by the same set of twenty product codes, that set can be maintained centrally and used by an "in list" filter rather than retyped.

See Filtering Your Data.

Search

This is the request most worth understanding before you make it, because the answer has a delay built into it.

Making a field findable. Global search only looks at fields that were specifically marked as searchable, and that is off unless somebody turned it on. So a field you can plainly read on a record may be completely invisible to search.

"Searching for a purchase order by its supplier reference finds nothing, although the reference is on every order. Could the Supplier Reference field be made searchable?"

Set your expectations: after the field is switched on, existing records have to be re-indexed before they can be found. Ask whether that has been done — otherwise you will test it, find nothing, and think the request was ignored.

Two things cannot be made findable this way at all: dates, and fields that link to several other records. For those, use a filter instead.

No search at all in your top bar. The search box appears only for roles that have been given access to it. Ask for search to be enabled for your role — and ask in the same message for the fields you need, because having search and having a findable field are two separate settings.

"There is no search box in the top bar. Could search be enabled for my role, and could the customer name and order number fields be made searchable?"

See Finding Things.

Dashboard And Widgets

Widgets have to be built and then made available to your role before they can appear on anyone's dashboard, and whether you may rearrange your own dashboard at all is itself a permission.

When asking for a widget, describe the number, not the picture:

"I would like a widget showing the count of open complaints older than 14 days, for my region only, refreshed when I open the dashboard. A single number is enough — I do not need a chart."

Include:

• which figure — a count, a total, an average, a list of records
• over what data — which records, filtered how
• for whom — only you, your team, everyone with your role
• what you would do with it — this often changes what they build

If you cannot rearrange your dashboard at all, that is worth asking for separately: "Could my role be allowed to edit its own dashboard?"

See Dashboard And Widgets.

Actions And Buttons

Buttons that do things — generate a document, send a notification, move a record to the next stage — are built for your application.

"When I approve a quote I then have to open the customer, change their status to Active, and e-mail the sales rep. Could that be one Approve button that does all three?"

This is the category where describing the job rather than the button pays off most, because a routine you do by hand fifty times a week is exactly what an action is for.

Also reasonable to ask:

• for an existing button's name to be made clearer, if people press it by mistake
• for a confirmation step on something irreversible
• for a button to be removed from a screen where it does not belong

Notifications

You cannot subscribe yourself to anything, and you cannot mute anything. Both directions are a request.

"I would like to be notified when a complaint assigned to my team has had no reply for two working days."

Say what event should trigger it, who should receive it, and how urgent it is — a message inside the application and an e-mail are different asks.

See Notifications, Jobs And Messages.

Data Protection And Recovery

Turning on the recycle bin. Deleting is permanent unless somebody changed that setting. If your team handles records where a mistaken deletion would hurt, ask for the recycle bin to be turned on — and be aware it protects only what is deleted after it is switched on. Two things have to line up: the application has to stop deleting permanently, and your role has to be allowed to open the Trash screen, which is not available in every application.

"We delete customer records occasionally and there is no way back. Could the recycle bin be turned on for our application, and could the support team be allowed to restore from it?"

Recovering something already deleted. Act quickly and say exactly what it was: the record type, its name or number, roughly when it was deleted, and by whom if you know. Recovery may not be possible — see Deleting Records And The Trash — so do not wait to ask.

A status instead of deleting. Very often what a team wants is not deletion but a way to take something out of circulation. Asking for an "Archived" or "Inactive" status is usually a better request than asking for deletion rights.

Practical Personal Things

These are quick fixes that need somebody else's hands:

See Your Profile And Account and Signing In.

Performance

If a screen is consistently slow or fails, that is a legitimate request and not something you should keep working around.

"The Deliveries screen times out at 250 rows per page with the totals turned on. At 50 rows it is fine. I need to review about 900 deliveries a week and I currently do it in four passes."

Include the numbers: which screen, which saved view, how many rows, which page size, whether calculations are on, and roughly how long before it failed. See Large Lists And Performance.

Two Things That Are Not Available

So you do not spend time asking for them:

• Importing from a spreadsheet. There is no end-user import screen. If you need to load data in bulk, that is a conversation about a one-off data load, not a feature you are missing.
• Printing. There is no print layout. Export to a spreadsheet and print from there, or ask for a document-generating action if you need a consistent printed output.

A Final Note

Asking is not an imposition. Almost everything in this chapter exists as a setting precisely so that it can be adjusted to how a team actually works. The people who set your application up generally cannot see which parts of it are getting in your way — telling them is the only way it improves.

Related Chapters

• Why Your Screen Differs From A Colleague's
• Roles, Groups And Permissions
• Large Lists And Performance
• When Something Goes Wrong
• Finding Things