The fight against Covid-19 seems to fall our way. And after an extremely wet April, May, and June, you might already be daydreaming about the Spanish Costa Del Sol or a sunny campsite in France. By living up towards your vacation, you almost forget that the business continues. How do you make sure that processes keep running smoothly, while you are not constantly thinking ‘I hope that goes well’? In this blog, we offer handles to transfer your tasks and leave your colleagues with the proper knowledge.

Temporarily hand over the baton

First, a good planning is important. You do not want that all key users with knowledge of the system meet each other on the campsite in France. Instead, make sure you can allocate all your responsibilities over the remaining colleagues – to stay in logistical terms. Do not only think about the happy flow, but also about what can potentially happen. What are the procedures then? You would want to prevent the procedure from being ‘call him or her’. Maybe there are also processes that can be put on hold, which makes it easier for your colleagues in the office. In short, a good preparation up front limits the worries during your deserved holiday.

4 tips for a smooth holiday transfer:

1. Don't change processes just before your vacation. Avoid stress and park any process changes until after your holiday to prevent stress among your colleagues and chaos when you return.

2. Provide clear work instructions. Help your replacement colleagues, and record the most frequently used steps, including a brief explanation of why these steps are followed. If something goes wrong, your replacement can easily read this in the work instruction. For example, how do you create templates? How do you set up contracts yourself? And how do you adjust user settings? It may be a piece of cake for you, but make sure that your replacement can also find its way.

3. Explain how to create a support report. After your transfer, your replacement knows its way around Dynamics like no other and should therefore be able to resolve error messages himself. However, it can always happen that your replacement encounters a problem that he or she cannot solve. For the fastest and most effective solution to the problem, your replacement makes a clear support message. How does he or she do this? Prepare your replacement for error messages? Use three practical examples, get tips and read more about how you can submit a support report.

4. Draw up a transfer checklist for yourself. This way you can be sure that you don't forget anything. Go through the checklist just before your vacation. Have you checked everything off? Then you are ready to put your replacement to work.

Solve unexpected errors

After you have left for your holiday and transferred your workload, it can still occur that something does not go the way it is supposed to. Then, an unexpected pop-up can show on your screen. Do your colleagues know what to do then?

Think logically

The first step is always to think logically. Did I do something different than usual? Do I know for sure that I followed standard procedures? Does this happen on all files or just this specific document? Try to find a shared denominator, to get closer to the solution.

Work from big to small

It works to work from big to small. What type of document am I working on? With what document? And on what line? In this way, you can create a smaller scope in which the problem can be found. Maybe you will not have the solution yet, but it helps to know your process better and you will have more input for the next steps.

Support is glad to help

After searching for the solution yourself, it is possible you need our support team to help figure it out. Solving the support issue is a team effort of both Elevate-IT and yourself. Remember that for you, your processes are crystal clear. However, our colleagues see lots of variants. You may have to walk through the process together, because every customer uses the standard in its own unique way. Therefore, a ticket with the information ‘the receive process does not work’ is meaningless for our support team. In that case, it will take more time to investigate what causes the problem. Time which could easily be spared!

Add Callstack to a ticket

To solve the ticket quickly and efficiently, you can attach the so called Callstack to the ticket. This might sound complicated, but it is nothing more than an overview of the code that is used. You can copy this text when you search for ‘Latest Error’. Or, if the error occurs in the scan screen, you can download a .txt file via ‘Scan Sessions’. Attaching the text file to your ticket is appreciated by our support team.

Back to work

Eventually, the goal is to return to work with a fully charged battery. Without any unpleasant surprises. To prevent is better than to cure, and with the steps above the chance to prevent difficult situations increases. So, take your time for a good transition and everything will run smoothly. Both for you, as for your colleagues.