Attribute Best Practices

What are Attributes?

Attributes provide a structured system for categorizing content and projects into various topic areas that align with your organizational structure, content framework, and business reporting.

Why are Attributes Useful?

A structured attribute architecture helps:

• Organize content into various subgroups for ease of filtering and finding responses more quickly and easily.

• Prevent content duplicates.

• Ensure content accuracy and SME accountability.

• Track key RFP metrics for reporting purposes.

• Turn data to information for gaining insights.

How to Develop / Modify an Attribute Structure

Start by mapping out an attribute tree outside of RocketDocs. Excel is a great tool for this exercise. Work with representatives from the RFP team to gain alignment and consensus. 

Once the attribute structure is finalized, the next step is to determine the attribute type and whether it's a required field (i.e., a value must be selected when content/project is added or before a project is published).

Attribute types include:

• Contact – people list (e.g., sales lead); tied to user groups managed within Administration > Permissions > Groups

• Currency – number field with pre-set currency type (e.g. USD, Euro)

• Date – date field with calendar selector

• Single-Select List – list of values where only one value can be selected

• Multi-Select List – list of values where multiple values can be selected

• Number – open number field

• Text – open text field

• Yes/No – select yes or no

• Calculation (Projects only) – calculates the number of days between two date fields to facilitate reporting

Projects attributes can also be designated as 'required to publish.' This means that a value will not be required on project creation but will be required in order to publish the project. Some examples of required to publish fields include: Level of Difficult, Number of Questions, Main Focus Area (or other information that you want to track but that you may not know until the project has been completed).

Attribute lists are not conditional and can be used in any combination. This is by design so lists don’t become unruly and filtering remains easy to use. Devising a flowchart, getting team buy-in, and distributing the final structure to the team will ensure consistency if multiple users are adding and categorizing content.

Attribute Best Practices

When creating a brand-new attribute structure aim to keep it simple: start with no more than three to five attributes. This can be built upon later if it becomes clear that more attributes are needed. When it comes to attributes, more is not necessarily better. If categorization is too granular, it's difficult to maintain, it can create confusion for people inputting content/projects, you risk incorrect categorization, and it makes filtering more difficult/time consuming. The most common attributes include (category names can vary based on the type and structure of your organization):

Tags

Tags are used to associate terms or keywords to content in a freeform way to help users easily locate records using a variety of search terms. There is no structure around how many tags are created and what terms can be used as tags.