The birth of our idea (Part 2)

Monday, 09. 7. 2009  –  Category: General

This is going to be a short 1. Continuing from my previous post, basically the problem I encountered during work is kind of similar to school and that is task management.

In my last 2 jobs, there’s usually a weekly meeting where the following will be conducted :

1) Assigning of tasks by project manager.
2) Status update
3) Change in task scope

So how do I keep track of my tasks.. I usually just roughly jot them down on a piece of paper, striking them out as and when I complete them. Everything is very unorganized and this makes it very difficult for me to track my task deadline, priority, retrieving relevant files. This hampers efficiency and sometimes, it caused me to miss deadlines.

Also, putting myself in the project manager shoe, isn’t it better if there’s a centralized platform to track all the tasks he has assigned to team members to have a clearer view on the project status. Weekly status meeting will also be redundant as assigning of tasks, status and etc can be retrieved from the platform. Personally, I dread status meeting because this is something which I feel is a waste of time.

I usually collaborate quite a lot with my team mates on the tasks assigned to me via IM. The system doesn’t allow me to save the conversation therefore one clumsy workaround I did is to copy the whole conversation and paste it to the note pad. The disadvantages to this approach are 1) Information is not stored on a centralized location therefore it is likely to “vanish” in time to come when I leave the company 2)Relevant files can’t be attached to tasks making any future reference more difficult.

In short, I believe a project/task managment software will help to improve productivity and efficiency as it can give a person a clear overview on the tasks assigned to him showing deadlines, priority, difficulty and etc.. All info can be retrieved from one platform rather than now, where everything are clustered together in email, making retrieval of information very difficult.

In my next post, I will discuss more on the product that we will be developing. Until then, next time.

Jon

Tags: executive summary, idea, project management, task management