Synclinical is delighted to announce that the most recent release of Ready Room has added workflow support to storyboards and brings the user interface for Ready Room’s inspection readiness functionality in line with inspection management.

This is a significant enhancement to our existing support for centralized storyboards and was designed and built with the active participation of our customers. Thank you!

Storyboard workflows are now generally available.

The Workflow

Ready Room storyboards can now progress through a multi-stage workflow, exactly like inspection requests do, where each storyboard is rendered as a card that can be dragged from column to column. Note, however, that because storyboard development is a comparatively sedate affair, taking months or even years to develop, storyboard changes are not reflected in real time to other user’s desktops.

The stages in the workflow are currently defined as follows:

All currently existing storyboards will default to the Pending state.

Contributors

Each stage in the workflow, except Pending, which is just a landing zone for newly created storyboards, can have a primary owner and zero or more collaborators, collectively known as contributors. After first creating or importing a storyboard, the creator can add or remove contributors by simply toggling the contributor’s name. Each contributor will be notified by email that they have been assigned to the storyboard. As a storyboard progresses through the workflow, contributors associated with each stage, if any, are again notified via email that their attention may be required.

Assignees associated with existing storyboards will be set to Owner collaborators by default. Current customers will likely want to move them around.

Controls

Most of the existing storyboard controls have been moved to the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Should the control's icon not adequately convey the underlying functionality, tool-tips are available on hover to make things more clear.

The four right-most buttons (rehearse, print, delete, and copy) are active only when at least one storyboard has been selected. You can select a storyboard by clicking the radio button on the top right corner of a card when in the workflow view or in the leftmost column when in the table view (see Views below) or you can toggle them all on and off with the button to the left of these four controls. The green badge will show the number of currently selected storyboards.

Filters

Storyboard filters have been rewritten and expanded to include System ID, Protocol, and Site. Keep in mind that while filters are applied as you type, the “Title/Description” filter has basic knowledge of the structure of the English language and will not be applied until you’ve entered most or all of a word. Storyboard filters are persistent and remain active until cleared.

Views

As with inspections, a “table view” of all storyboards is also available. Existing customers may prefer to work with the table view at first as it more closely resembles the accustomed view.

The principal difference between the two views is that the table view can be sorted and the workflow view supports drag and drop. The workflow view is the default.

Tabs

Several tabs now exist to help keep storyboards organized. They are as follows:

Other Areas of Note

While the “New Storyboard” button has moved to the upper left, the functionality has not changed, and you can still derive new storyboards from our Process, Problem, and Role templates, as well as import any of our more than 200 GCP, GMP, and GVP pre-built templates.

Another change involves the enhancements made when converting a storyboard to an inspection request. Previously, only the title, labels, and attachments were copied over. Now, the text of the storyboard is copied over to the response field, where it can be edited or deleted. (Keep in mind that once released, responses will be visible to inspectors.) Furthermore, the inspection request’s fulfiller is now set to the primary interviewee, i.e. the owner of the last stage in the storyboard workflow.

As before, storyboards are associated with programs that you create (a program is a collection of inspections that share storyboards and labels), but now storyboard IDs start at one (1) for each program. This change necessitated a new URL structure (note the “/v2/”):

Old: /programs/a2daa540-8c82-4e73-bd78-38397b94b723/storyboards/6789
New: /programs/a2daa540-8c82-4e73-bd78-38397b94b723/storyboards/v2/1

If you follow a link that was generated by an earlier release of Ready Room, you will be redirected to the new URL.

Coming Up

Over the next few months will be extending this base functionality to deliver on some long-standing customer requests. While no dates are firm as yet, we plan to incrementally deliver the following functionality by the end of the year.

• Storyboard comments
• Multiple contributors to inspection requests
• Customer configurable storyboard and inspection workflows
• As well as a variety of smaller enhancements

We hope our Ready Room users enjoy this new functionality, and we look forward to your feedback, which, as always, will help inform future improvements and enhancements.