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How to work with tasks and events

Concept

Tasks & Events are a key feature of ISOPlanner. They represent:

  1. What your organization needs to do to implement a compliance framework
  2. What you and your colleagues need to do to maintain and monitor the implemented compliance frameworks (Support of the PDCA cycle).
  3. Compliance related events that happen in your ecosystem.
  4. The evidence (for an auditor) what has been done including the results.

 

ISOPlanner brings tasks and events to the workplace in Microsoft 365. Documents and evidence are safely stored in your own SharePoint environment. Optionally, all data can be used in Power BI to create stunning interactive reports.

You can create and find tasks and events in various places in ISOPlanner:

 

Tasks

Tasks are very versatile and can be based on templates. Templates are a great way of standardizing your way of working. Use tasks for example to:

  1. Monitor a control and upload evidence.
  2. Registering an incident.
  3. Handling a non-conformity from an (internal) audit.
  4. Performing a supplier assessment.
  5. Implement a new framework.
  6. Start a workflow using Power Automate.

 

To support this, tasks have the following high level features:

  1. Tasks can be related to almost anything, from assets to risks to controls, other tasks (follow-up) and more.
  2. Tasks support recurrence compatible with Outlook.
  3. Tasks support easy to use checklists.
  4. Tasks support custom forms that can hold fields in different format (text, date, choice, number, attachment and more).
  5. Tasks support an activity trail where important events are logged automatically (e.g. task was overdue) and where you can add comments.
  6. Tasks support a library of linked resources like documents, URLs and more.
  7. Tasks support custom tags.
  8. Tasks have a changelog for traceability.

 

Events

Events in ISOPlanner have the meaning of compliance related ‘things’ that you want to know and/or want to act on. Events compared to tasks have no:

  1. Assignment
  2. Deadline
  3. Recurrence

 

To act on an event, events can have one or more tasks (sub tasks). And events can also be based on templates, including all sub tasks. This means that events are a great way to handle more complex scenarios where multiple steps are involved (instead of a single task). That why events are the best way to connect to workflows and your ecosystem.

 

Tasks menu

My Tasks

Where to find it in ISOPlanner: https://portal.isoplanner.app/tasks/mytasks

With default filters, this tab shows tasks that are assigned to you, are not completed and can be worked on.
Tasks that can be worked on:

  • include occurrences in a series and sub tasks of events.
  • exclude recurring series (in the annual plan) and events themselves.

With the filter below, additional tasks can be shown:

  1. Tasks that have been completed.
  2. Tasks that have been shared with a “shared with” group.
  3. Tasks that are assigned to any member of the team/group Management.

 

Further reading

  1. Basic task features like view options, filters, editing, and reports.
  2. Sharing is part of the authorization feature (RBAC) in Business and Premium subscriptions. Please read more about it here.
  3. Read more about how to show teams and groups in the filter here.

 

My Requests

Where to find it in ISOPlanner: https://portal.isoplanner.app/tasks/myrequests

With default filters, this tab shows tasks that are owned by you and are created in the current audit year and can be tracked.

Tasks that can be tracked:

  • include events and occurrences in a series. You must be owner of the event to track the sub tasks.
  • exclude sub tasks and recurring series (in the annual plan).

When you create a task, you become the owner by default. You can also set an owner on a template. This overview is useful to track tasks that are not handled by you. If you have permissions, you can click on the name of the owner to select another owner.

When important events are created for a task that you own, an activity is shown for you on your dashboard.

  1. When a task is overdue.
  2. When a task is set to status rejected.

 

Further reading

  1. Basic task features like view options, filters, editing, and reports.

 

All Tasks & Events

Where to find it in ISOPlanner: https://portal.isoplanner.app/tasks/alltasks

This tab shows all tasks that are created in the current audit year excluding recurring series (in the annual plan).

This tab is only available for users with a Licensed role. Standard users can see only tasks which are assigned to them or shared with them and they can see those in the menu “my tasks”.

Further reading

  1. Basic task features like view options, filters, editing, and reports.

 

Templates

See: How to work with templates

 

Tasks & Events of other items

Tasks and events are the “Dossier” of work done including the evidence. Relating a task to the items they ‘belong’ to is a good practice. You can pre-configure this with task templates so users don’t forget it.

For example, you might want to relate an incident to some controls of your standard. For ISO 27001 this might be A.5.26 Response to information security incidents but A.5.27 Learning from information security incidents is also good because in the task you might want to describe preventive actions which can be learned from.

When a task is created with a relation to such an item or items (unlimited!), you can also view the tasks belonging to the item by navigating to that item and choosing the tab Tasks & Events.

This is handy for many purposes and especially for auditing and is available for:

  • Processes
  • Objectives
  • Requirements
  • Assets (Business / Premium)
  • Risks
  • Controls

 

In the example below, for Supplier (asset) Microsoft, the supplier assessment tasks are nicely ordered and available for audit.

Resources
  1. Basic task features like view options, filters, editing, and reports.
  2. Annual plan
  3. How to work with templates
  4. Teams and groups
  5. Power Automate