Creating action plans
The Opportunity Administrator defines one or more default action plans that are available to Opportunity Managers. The managers create new opportunities, choosing from the default action plans and modifying them, if necessary, for the unique situation.
If you want to provide the option of creating opportunities with no action plan, define an empty action plan named "None."
Action plans are made up of stages (major milestones) and tasks (minor milestones) and are created by the following process:

Flow process to create an action plan
To create an action plan
- From Opportunity, select Set up module.
- On the Action Plans tab, click Add Action Plan.
The Opportunity Action Plan window appears.
- Enter a name and description for the action plan.
- From the Opportunity Type drop-down list, select the opportunity type to relate to the action plan.
Note: You can change the Opportunity Type only before you save the action plan.
- Click Save.
Note: You must click Save to set the related opportunity type before you define the action plan stages, because the list of available assignees for tasks and email notifications is based on the related opportunity type.
- Define the action plan stages:
- In the Stages area of the window, click the Add icon.
- Enter the name and description of the stage.
- From the Update Win Probability drop-down list, select a value.
- From the Update Status drop-down list, select a status.
- (optional) Define the tasks for each stage:
- In the Tasks area of the window, click Add.
- Enter information about the task. Use comments to insert helpful hints or procedure information.
- Assign the days allowed for each task. The action plan starts on Day 0.
- From the Priority drop-down list, select the task's priority.
- From the Assignee drop-down list, select assignees for the task. The list includes only opportunity owners and contacts associated with the action plan's related opportunity type.
- Click Continue.
- (optional) Add a Note to the stage:
- In the Notes area of the window, click Add.
- Enter the note.
- Click Continue.
- (optional) Attach an e-mail notification to a stage or task:
- Select Email Notifications.
- In the Email Notifications area of the window, click Add.
- Click the Process Lookup icon to select the desired e-mail merge output process. The Opportunity Administrator must create an e-mail merge output process before you can attach an e-mail notification to an action plan.
- Click … near the Assignee field and use the resulting list to select assignees for the email notification. The list includes only opportunity owners and contacts associated with the action plan's related opportunity type.
- Click Continue.
- Click Save.
Caution! Action plans that were created in iMIS version 10.5 or earlier must be manually upgraded to work properly in iMIS version 10.6 and later. See the section about upgrading iMIS Server .NET installations in the Installation Guide or Quick Upgrade for details.
Notes
- The designated Opportunity Type controls the opportunities that can use the action plan and controls the users and email addresses roles that can be assigned to the action plan based on the roles associated with that opportunity type.
- To relate an action plan to multiple opportunity types, you can copy the action plan and relate the copy to a different Opportunity Type.
- The status of a task, note, or e-mail notification displays when the action plan is started.
- Use tasks to advance the action plan when timelines should be assigned. For example, if call notes or meeting notes should be completed within 24 hours, assign these items as tasks and assign an interval of 1.
- Use notes to advance the action plan to record that something has been completed, but no pre-defined timeline was assigned. Otherwise, notes are not required. You can simultaneously mark multiple notes as complete.
- Tasks that are generated when the assigned action plan starts inherit their security settings from the opportunity and are visible to users who have read-level access or better for the opportunity.
- If you create a task manually, full-control access is granted to the creator of the opportunity, the group of Opportunity Owners, and the System Administrator.
- You must define at least one Assignee for an Email Notification before you can close the Opportunity Email Notification definition window.