AtTask: Usability+Scalability+Customizability=High Degree of Likability

Visibility: When I began interviewing team members when I first started in my current role, the first and most common complaint I heard from the majority of them was "Too many status meetings eating up time." I've always viewed this as a symptom of a problem, rather than the problem itself. Upon further investigation, it became clear that the problem was a lack of visibility and consistency in reporting for stakeholders. Some of our project managers were creating a wiki space for every project, others were using online workspaces, some even resorted to using a local Excel or Word document to keep track of progress. This caused our stakeholders to experience what I call "Status Anxiety." It was infinitely easier for each of them to setup a weekly status call for their projects, which in turn made the work going into maintenance of the project wikis, workspaces, and scope documents redundant. Enter AtTask. Ease of use for our stakeholders mixed with customizability made it very easy to give all of our stakeholders a "one stop shop" for engaging our team, communicating with the project managers, and allowing them to see exactly what the project's status is in a few clicks. Obviously, the caveat here is that our project managers are then responsible for keeping information up to date, which is unavoidable in almost any scenario. It's difficult for project managers to change behaviors and commit to using a new tool, but AtTask provides the best combination of usability and capability which is helpful in the buy-in process.

Single Source of Truth: The second major symptom I learned about from team members is that the same information about a project was being maintained in more than one tool, and those tools did not communicate with each other. The real concern here is that the information being duplicated was critical data that was vital to a successful project execution. In the most extreme example, one project manager had to update 4 separate data sources any time there was an update on a project. Each of those 4 data sources had a different owner, which mean they all had their own quirks and nuances when it comes to naming conventions and editing processes. Again, this was a symptom of the real problem. The problem being that no one had taken the initiative to implement a single set of standards for tracking project information. Everyone was left to their own devices. This might give those people an illusion of satisfaction by letting them "do it however they want." The reality, however, is that this mode of operation is a catalyst for chaos. With AtTask, we were able to migrate existing data to the appropriate projects and use the reporting and dashboard tools to provide the project managers with the same functionality while giving our stakeholders that "one stop shop" they didn't know they wanted so badly. The caveat here, is that licensing becomes an issue. We have 150+ licenses, but hundreds of stakeholders. We are able to use public reports to allow those stakeholders to have visibility without requiring a license, but this is undoubtedly a restraint in my opinion. There is more good news however, if license quantities is an issue. AtTask provides a wonderful API for accessing, creating, modifying, and even deleting project data using the RESTful API. If you have some PHP, JavaScript, and HTML skills, then you can heavily customize your usage of AtTask and enable reporting, updating without having to be logged in to the AtTask interface.

"Scalable Usability": I don't know if this is a real term, but I use it anyway. I use it to describe how easy it is to control the complexity of the system on a group or user by user basis. If one of our stakeholders requires nothing more than read-only access to projects, I can easily control what they see in AtTask and cut out all of the excess information that is not required. I can also setup one of our project managers with an expert level access that permits them to customize their own interface and create unique views, filters, reports, and dashboards that they need. In all of the work management tools/solutions I have used, this is where AtTask really shines. The same system is as relevant and useful to the "once a week" user as it is to the "I live in it" user. The ability to create custom data that you can track and report on is of immense value. After only 12 months of tracking a few metrics from our custom data, we are now aggressively expanding the amount of tracking and reporting we do inside of AtTask. The trends we were able to report on using custom data, which required minimal maintenance during the year, spoke for itself when those reports were delivered. Buy-in from management was instant. As with my previous examples, I'll caveat this as well. If you get in the habit of creating too many unique access profiles and too much custom data, I can see how it could easily get out of hand. The temptation to "just throw it in there" is great, especially since it is so easy to do.

Ease of Use: Regardless of how simple the tool is, you will always encounter push-back when trying to transition a large group of people into a new system. We understood this and released AtTask in smaller, more digestible waves, incorporating the more advanced features gradually. This helped by allowing the users to get to know the system on a simpler level first, helping in their "conversion" if you will. As we then rolled out the more advanced, and "cooler" features, they were anxious, even excited for it. Even with this approach, we still faced potential roadblocks. Taking advantage of how customizable the AtTask experience is, our stakeholders were able to catch on very fast, and we were surprised at how quickly the praise started to come in. A great example of this is an email that was sent to myself and my manager. The subject line, "AtTask Rocks!" She went on to express how much she loved being able to find the right person at any given time on any one of her projects, and how easy it was for her to collaborate with the project team. We have even received requests from multiple teams for licenses so they could start using AtTask because they had seen such positive reactions from their peers. I have never seen that happen before. A team coming to me, asking to be a part of the radical process change.