Jen’s Dilemma

In my past two posts, I’ve discussed work management and the importance of the project team member in information flow. In this post, I want to share a slightly different perspective on the same theme: that of the project manager, who I call Jen. Jen is a typical project manager with the typical project management struggles. Information flow is key to her success and therefore the success of the project. But much of her time is spent collecting information. From estimates to assignments to updates to reports, information flow is hampered by a variety of barriers. Once she has a breakdown of the work for the project, she emails out a list of items for estimation to various group leads. Each of those leads has various other projects they’re working on, so quite often she has to follow up several times to get a response. Once she gets all of the estimates back, she has to enter them into the project management software. After she makes assignments through the project management tools, she has to set up meetings to make sure everyone understands and commits to their assignments. Once the project is in execution, she holds weekly status meetings to get updates and ensure cross-functional visibility. Jen spends an enormous amount of time aggregating all of the information from email, notes, and meetings so that she can get it into the system. She believes in the concept of enterprise project management software to improve work management, but project management tools are useless without all of the data from the trenches. Since none of the project teams will use the software, she spends countless hours entering and massaging the data in the software herself. Here are some possible solutions to Jen’s data entry problem: Jen could mandate (or get management to mandate) that the project teams use the project software. This works_��sort of. When people are mandated to do something they don’t want to do, they only do the minimum required — that means low quality data that is probably updated on a minimal interval, like weekly or monthly. Jen could keep doing what she’s doing. Eventually, she’ll crack. Either she’ll burn out or her lack of efficiency will cost a project’s success. Get work management software that the team members enjoy using. You may say “who enjoys using work management software?” You might be surprised. People spend at least 1/3 of their life working, and lots of those people (like you and I) do it using software. Anything that makes 1/3 or more of my life easier is definitely worth it_��I might even call it enjoyable. Think about how much time people spend customizing their desktop, adding plugins to their browsers, and making their email signature look pretty. They want control and comfort in their daily grind. #3 is something that we (here at AtTask) are focusing on right now. We’re tailoring each feature, each screen, each interaction to the user. Imagine a button for Jen that would with one click get an estimate from all of her project team members and automatically aggregate it into a reporting system. Imagine an environment that naturally motivated team members to collaborate and voluntarily share rich information about their work_��every day. And what if all of this information were continually flowing into the system and generating analysis and recommendations? Stay tuned. To learn more about where we’re going with Work Management, come to our user conference in May.