As project manager at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Mark Pohlmann is required to manage large IT projects with expert teams located all around the world, as well as with consultants working on site. Upon discovering DropTask (Ayoa) in 2013, Mark decided to select it as the collaborative tool he and his team would need in order to keep track on the progress of ever-changing priorities determined through regular team meetings. Earlier this year, Mark took some time to explain the fundamental role that DropTask (Ayoa) plays in managing his team in order to deliver timely results.
 

“My job is to manage multiple large-scale IT projects on a daily basis, with several teams working remotely across various sites around the world. I need to be informed of what’s happening on each project (via a status report), and need to share this information with both my team and my management so we can establish new deadlines, progress, and any issues that could potentially arise. Prior to DropTask (Ayoa), collecting this information from the field and assembling the status report required a lot of time and effort, so I began to search for a cloud-based tool which would be accessible to everyone. A representation of the work that needed to be done was vital, as well as the ability to assign this work to team members, collect updates, and more precisely – let individual team members update each other of their status. This would then assist me in generating a report for management.

Many task management tools don’t allow strong ‘group’ management. For some, a task can belong to a group – and that’s it. A group cannot belong to a group, and without nested grouping you create the sort of limit which doesn’t work when trying to represent the complexity of a project. With DropTask (Ayoa) , I was able to place groups within groups, which allowed me to represent the work as it is. I was also able to find various common properties you’d expect such as due date, status, and subtasks, but in addition to this I was able to helpfully set the ‘urgency’ and ‘importance’ for each task – which isn’t that common to find.


Weekly Project Status Report, Phase #1. This illustrates how DropTask (Ayoa) is used within our weekly project status report deck. Consultants update DropTask (Ayoa) and the current status is extracted and presented with some comments to Management.

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Depending on the project, at the end of each week and month I export all task related information into a CSV file to update corporate reports and dashboards. I save a huge amount of time since all of the information I need to update is right there. In addition to this, I can screen capture the DropTask (Ayoa) Task Board representation to create a unique slide for status reporting. Again, this saves me a lot of time since DropTask (Ayoa) is designing a picture for me to view Task Board status. This makes collaboration so much easier as people can report what they want during the day, resulting in fewer phone calls, less paperwork (with information the team need to hand to me), and no to-do ‘lists’. Our corporate dashboards are updated easily, and the time saved for both myself and my team can be better spent working on deliverables for our customers.

There are plenty of task management tools out there, but to fully understand many of these you’re required to spend hours ‘learning’ how things work. This is no good because we don’t have the time to do this. DropTask (Ayoa) is intuitive, made for humans, and is simple to use. Within a couple of minutes you’ve understood what you need to do and can begin to work. As well as this, all task management tools are ‘list based’ and aren’t necessarily fun to use, with poor and unattractive ‘visual’ reports. DropTask (Ayoa), on the other hand, gives me a unique Task Board status report which is visually beautiful and this is perfect for when I report to senior management who like to “pin” these reports up on their wall.”



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