Daily business life is full of tasks; work, meetings, phone calls, appointments, business trips and much more. Many professionals to remember, manage and finally accomplish these tasks, they use post-it notes, pieces of paper with to-do lists, calendar notebooks or just their minds. However, some others use Online Task Management Software. In this article, we present the main reasons that lead professionals to use advanced online task management software for enterprise collaboration and the respective benefits.
1. Don’t forget tasks
Crucial or minor, urgent or future, complex or simple, no task should get forgotten. According to Anders Clark, Writer / Editor / Project Manager at Disciples of Flight “Online Task management software is a good way to log and organize the tasks as they come, and be reminded to take care of them at an appropriate time”. Jordan Warzecha, CEO & Co-Founder of backstitch, illustrates it with an example based on his experience “Anytime something like a bug or customer request comes up we put it in a Priority Dependent list that we pull from when assigning tasks. That way we don’t forget ad-hoc tasks but don’t have to stress about them in the back of our minds. We can just add it to the list and move on.”
2. Cleaner Email Inbox
Actually, the majority of emails is related with tasks. Tasks that have been assigned to you or tasks that you have assigned to others…David Bakke from SparkCharge Media LLC underlines that “Online Task management software offers a better way to communicate rather than relying on say, email.” Corey Barnett, Founder & Consultant of Cleverly Engaged Marketing, has noticed that “The ability to comment on assignments directly in the task management software keeps more emails out of the inbox. It also prevents super long email chains of 50+ replies that are difficult to read.”
3. Enterprise Collaboration
Mark Tuchscherer, co-founder and president Geeks Chicago describes “We have people in multiple offices, all working on multiple tasks with different groups. People can view and update tasks on the go. If something changes with regard to a task, individuals can receive alerts on their mobile phones and laptops”.
Vasili Puntus, Marketing specialist at Xpansa Group shares with us “Our team can work together with a lot of tasks at the same time. We can quickly and easily communicate and interact each other when it needed. In this case, we can know and plan resource usage. As a result, it allows us to save time for all team and help us to work more efficiently and faster. People in the company can work together around the world mixed the knowledge, culture and help our company grows together with them.”
4. Sense of Accomplishment
Completing task is satisfying by itself, but using task tracking tools it can be more…! Steve Gibson Director of JotForm Inc considers that “It’s extremely satisfying to move things from one field to the next.”Moreover, as Jordan Warzecha explains “Being able to look back at everything that got accomplished over a day, week or month gives a concrete way for a team to have a sense of accomplishment.” Marc Prosser, co-founder and managing partner of Marc Waring Ventures, agrees and wonders “Who doesn’t get a kick out of crossing items off a list?”
5. Responsibility
Individuals using task management software may feel more responsible. Manish Raje, Founder of MyOPDClinic Software, explains “When a Task is assigned to an individual, it keeps the individual on track with a set date of completion. As people become more accountable, they feel more responsible.”
6. Productivity
Marc Prosser,describes “Task tracking software can track how long and how much effort things take to accomplish, and in so doing, can help you refine your productivity. If you’re not tracking something, you can’t optimize it, and task tracking software can be a great way to assess how you’re doing at specific tasks.”
7. Traceability
Steve Gibson informs us that using task tracking app “You can give an accounting of what you did long after the fact.” Manish Raje has realized that “People come and people go. As a result, an important business function is to know history of a Task, may be days or years later, be it any communication or a support issue. With everything logged into a Tracking software, business become less people dependent and more process dependent.”
8. On time and budget
Mark Tuchscherer considers that “Tracking tasks with software is one of the best ways to ensure that tasks and projects hit deadlines while remaining on budget.” According to Amy Fowler, Online Marketing Manager of Boom Online Marketing “Probably the biggest benefit (to task tracking software) for us as a company is the ability to manage client budgets. Everything we do at Boom is highly variable; our clients all have different budgets, and instead of charging a fixed amount for each task we do, we charge an hourly rate for our time. This means that without task tracking software it would become very (very!) difficult to keep track of how much of each client’s budget has been spent, especially since we also need to be able to keep track of this throughout the length of our working relationship with each client (even though our clients pay a set amount each month, we’re a little more fluid in how we use their budget and we just need to ensure that the books balance over time).”
9. Human Resource Management
Steve Gibson and Anders Clark agree that “with task tracking software, you start to gain a better idea of how long certain tasks take, and what resources they require and this allows you to better plan for similar tasks in the future.”
Amy Fowler claims that “Task tracking software is also imperative in managing our staff’s time, and ensuring they’re not under, or overworked. Although we can never measure exactly how long something will take, we assign each task a set number of hours. This means that, once we’ve calculated approximately how much work each member of staff would be capable of completing in a given month (another huge variable on account of staff’s differing responsibilities, and of course, holidays) we can ensure they’re assigned the right amount of work to fill their time.”
