About the city of Erlangen
With almost 120,000 inhabitants, the German city of Erlangen is the eighth biggest city in Bavaria. Erlangen is a medical city, home to over 20,000 university students, and counts innovation, research, and education among its cornerstones. Olga Yanenko is head of web technology and online services in the city administration of Erlangen and was responsible for the cross-departmental introduction of Stackfield in the municipality two years ago.
No collaboration tool, no central overview, no Stackfield: this is what collaboration in the municipality used to look like
Before Stackfield became part of the daily administrative work at the city of Erlangen, processes were handled without any collaboration tool at all. SecureCloud was used to store files, document versions were edited collectively in a document management system and communication was primarily conducted via email. However, processes in the city administration often have to run across several offices and require numerous micro-work steps - without a central overview, bottlenecks are usually unavoidable and so the urge for digital support grew. The goal: a task management tool and in particular its Kanban functionality should finally create work-in-progress (WIP) limits, i. e. reduce ongoing work and thus inefficient multitasking, employee overload, and bottlenecks to a minimum.
Data protection and price-performance winner: why Stackfield was chosen
An extensive list of requirements supported the city of Erlangen in its search for a suitable collaboration tool: team chats to minimize internal emails, subtasks to handle extensive tasks efficiently, an individual distribution of rights to integrate external service providers, and more. Luckily Stackfield met all of the city's requirements at an acceptable price.
Stackfield fully convinced us in terms of security standards – for us as a city administration, these are particularly essential.
Involving and inviting employees via intranet page and application form
After the decision in favor of Stackfield, the team under Olga Yanenko organized an intranet page with various explanatory videos on Stackfield for all interested parties in the city administration. Now, if an office or team is interested in Stackfield, it can order a license using the application form. Stackfield is currently used by around 700 people in the city of Erlangen and the number continues to grow. We regularly reorder licenses,
says Yanenko. To avoid 'dead' licenses, users who have been inactive for more than half a year are automatically deactivated and the license is released again. As the users are only deactivated and not removed, we can also reactivate them if they were just ill or need Stackfield again. That's very practical.
Digitization of online services: Kanban functionality, custom fields and collaboration with other offices
In Stackfield, many of the city's processes are now digitized and simplified. Olga Yanenko explains how this simplifies the authorities' work using the example of online services.
The online services include all internal and external applications that are offered digitally by the city of Erlangen, such as assessment forms or citizen's allowance applications. Before Stackfield, managing the many different, often parallel applications was a real challenge. Yanenko explains: The area of online services was one of the most chaotic due to the many individual orders that all had to be processed in parallel and regularly sent to different specialist offices.
Today, the entire process is mapped in a separate Stackfield room. Each application is assigned its own task in the Kanban board of the room and is moved back and forth between the various columns depending on the current status. The subtasks directly in the task card also support the office in documenting individual task steps in detail, assigning them individually, and dating them. The columns make it possible to see where the task is currently located at a glance, bottlenecks become visible more quickly and feedback cycles can be adjusted accordingly.
Within the task, information is not only stored in the predefined fields but also individual, custom fields defined by the office. This simplifies the classification of information within the task card and creates a structure tailored to the application's purpose.
We only recently discovered the individual data fields, but now use them very intensively. They are incredibly practical. Before, we had to put all the information in the description. The individual fields now make it much easier to export and evaluate our tasks.
Another advantage of using Stackfield: communication with other specialist offices is no longer a problem when processing applications. Responsible colleagues from other offices are simply added to the room and assigned to a (sub)task if required. The room thus serves as an interface and simplifies collaboration across offices.
Olga Yanenko is excited about the many possibilities that the Stackfield room offers. Employees track their processing times with Stackfield's time tracking and thus, learn how to allocate their resources. In the Snippets module, JavaScript code can be shared with colleagues to optimize the form system. Labels in the Kanban board help with the overview. Stackfield rooms offer a user-definable workspace for every application purpose.
Process-related communication in the room via team chat and comment section
The city administration of Erlangen communicates as much as possible within the team and office in Stackfield. This reduces the amount of internal email traffic and keeps the mailbox clear for external communication. In separate rooms, in the comments sections of tasks, polls, and pages, or in group and private chats, all kinds of communication channels required for daily collaboration are available.
Before Stackfield, there were huge, confusing floods of emails. For this reason, we switched to communicating in Stackfield on a process and team basis. This keeps our communication clear and comprehensible.
Team collaboration in document creation with Stackfield's pages
To this day, the city of Erlangen still stores files in an external document management system (DMS). However, without version control, there is hardly any overview. For this reason, Stackfield is now also partially used for document creation. Yanenko explains: If we have to create a document together, we create a page in the corresponding Stackfield room. Everyone can then edit the page and we only store the document in our system once it has been finished.
This helps the city administration to prevent too many different versions ending up in the DMS. The Stackfield room makes the document available to all team members for editing, users can exchange information on specific topics in the comments section of the page and the history shows all changes to the document, including the time and user. In addition, old versions can be called up and restored at any time if required.
External individuals with limited user rights in the event organization of the Cultural Office
In the Cultural Office of Erlangen, external service providers are often brought on board for the organization of campaigns, events, or festivals like the Erlangen International Comic Salon. All employees involved, whether internal or external, are added to a new project room and can work together in a workspace specially created for the event. However, to ensure that external service providers are not integrated with the standard rights, the Cultural Office makes use of the Stackfield user roles. This means that external users are only given the rights that are required for the relevant event organization. Content that should only be accessible to internal employees, on the other hand, remains hidden - a great support for the Cultural Office when working with external employees.
A sense of community - even in home office
Spread across various locations, working from home or the office, the Office for Digitalization has almost 40 employees. Stackfield's status icons are used to show where colleagues are located at any time. A small picture next to the user name shows whether the user is working in the 'office' or 'home office'. To ensure that coffee and hallway conversations can still take place, Stackfield's communication channels are used to chat and discuss topics such as the next office trip.
It has become common to send a good morning message even when working from home. That's why Stackfield is so popular with my colleagues. We have really noticed how the tool continued to spread and became a central component.