Collaborative Task Management

I started working in industry before people had laptops. That means the main method of communicating project status was primarily team meetings, and then everyone went back to work. I have seen that evolve into meetings where everyone had their computer (and little attention for the meeting) with elaborate timing plans and Excel sheets. Unfortunately, this is the spot where I see a lot of companies are stuck. If this is where your company is at, it is time to evolve to the next step in collaboration, because the rest of the world has moved on.

Let me explain a typical collaboration scenario, in which I see many people stuck, and see if this story sounds familiar.

Worker #1 is working on 3 Projects. Project #1, Project #2, and Project #3. All 3 projects have a different Program Manager, and different customers.

Worker #1 will go to a weekly meeting on Project #1 ran by Program Manager #1. The Program Manager keeps an "Open Actions" list for the whole team to go over in this meeting. The hour meeting is spent reviewing conversations from the past week, talking about e-mails that have already been written on the topic, and everyone watches as topics get summarized in the open action list. Each participant in the meeting is probably only engaged for a few minutes each on the topic that pertains to them, and even that part is usually information they already know. It is just a way of keeping the Program Manager up to date.

In the best case scenario, the people actually doing the work feel like they just wasted an hour in a meeting. Once they repeat this process 2 more times for other projects they are working on, the inefficiencies start to get frustrating. On top of that, the individual Program Managers will put their open actions lists in different locations, usually on a network drive. Forcing workers to actively hunt around in various locations for what tasks are assigned to them, and never have a consolidated list unless they duplicate the efforts already done.

Sure enough, throughout the week, the status on the open actions list is not going to "up to date enough" and there will be work interruptions, conversations and e-mails that will again get re-capped in the next meeting.

Let's not forget that the Program Manager is usually not Worker #1's direct manager, so he has to repeat another process of updating his own manager. Or worse yet, have an hour long office visit, which interrupts actually work, to give out the same information.

Sound familiar? Even if it is only remotely similar, it is easy to see the inefficiencies in such a process. It should not take much convincing to see that there has to be a better way.

For people doing work there are 2 big time killers. Meetings and Managers. The intent of setting up and using an effective collaborative task manager targets these two time killers. It goes after keeping management up to date efficiently and with as little re-work as possible. And, minimizing meeting times by taking the "updating" part out of the equation, and allow the focus to be on progress and roadblacks. Not just status.

Imagine this scenario instead.....

Instead of Worker #1 going to a 1 hour meeting each week, they go to 15 minute meeting. For whatever topics they are working on, the updates from the past week have already been captured. For the overall project, the meeting can consist of tasks that are behind schedule, or are stuck. The meeting can consist of the next steps needed from the team to move the project forward. Done!

Bonus is that everything captured on the project can also be reviewed by all managers. No need to chase and update, and interrupt work. They would just have to go look at the update when they needed to know it.

But, there are more bonuses. For the worker, this can be done for every project that they are working on. Tasks assigned to them can be filtered and a dashboard created. Everything that they need to work on is contained in one nice summary screen. For the Program Manager, they can look across all the programs they are in charge of, and see the status of any and all programs. For the Functional Manager, they get the most benefit. They will be able to see the workload of individual employees, see what all people in the group are assigned to, or look across the functional areas of the organization to see how much time is being spent in different areas.

The last one is a big one! Often organizations spend time doing things like new product development, legacy program support, and obtaining new business. When looked at through any one lens, it can be tough to tell that people are being stretched thin because you can not see their full utilization. Using a well setup system can also help with resource management as well.

There are many programs out there than can help you achieve this new scenario. Trello, Asana, Monday, Wrike, and Basecamp to name a few. I have my favorite, but the best one is the one that fits your organization.

The real key is to make sure they are setup in the way that supports your organization before you start using it, and people start putting information in them. If the system you choose turns into a big jumbled mess, it is going to be more aggravating and confusing to the users, and will take a lot of effort to untangle.

I try to explain it to people in terms of network drives. I am assuming most people are used to working with a network folder structure. If you create 1 folder, and let everybody and anybody put information where they want, it will quickly turn into an unorganized mess. Instead, if you come up with a consistent, repeatable structure for each program or project, almost anyone can navigate to the correct location and find what they need.

Collaborative task managements work in much the same way. If you have the vision for what you want it to do for you, and then implement that, the next steps are to train users and start populating the system.

I have literally spent hours, weeks, months and even years setting up these systems to get the results needed. If you want to work with me on a project like this, please contact me. I can figure out what your specific business needs are, suggest a system that I believe would work best, setup a demo with a system. Once it is working as you like, I can providing training or training materials for your employees, and also help with support if you run into issues while using it.