WHETHER YOU'RE
PLANNING a holiday or rolling out a new product, there are times when
you need to organize your business or family tasks in conjunction with others. A
solo task management app can start to feel rather limiting in these
circumstances, and you may need to look further afield for tools that let
multiple users interact.
Of the time managers reviewed here, both
Wunderlist and TaskPaper support degrees of collaborative working, with
TaskPaper's Dropbox-based implementation being perhaps the easiest to work
with. Sharing the folder that contains your TaskPaper document with another
user will allow them to open it in their own client app so that any changes either
of you make to the document will be reflected on every registered device.
both
Wunderlist and TaskPaper support degrees of collaborative working, with
TaskPaper's Dropbox-based implementation being perhaps the easiest to work with
There are various systems that go further
without taking you into the cumbersome realm of traditional server-based
enterprise-level project management solutions. Basecamp (basecamp.com) is an
online service that went live in 2004 has since been used to manage more than
eight million projects for 200,000 companies. It extends to-do list management
to encompass projects, groups, delegated responsibilities, a document and file
repository, shared calendars and discussions.
Each element is organized on a single page
to give you a project-wide overview of what's going on, what's been achieved
and what still needs to be done. There's a 45-day free trial, but beyond that
it's a premium service, starting at $20 (about £12.60) a month for up to 10
projects and 3GB of storage. You can extend this through four tiers as far as a
$150 (£95) per month plan for an unlimited number of projects with 100GB of
storage.
Your team's achievements are tracked minute
by minute, and as well as providing a daily progress timeline, Basecamp mails
out a daily report for each of your team members to review.
Basecamp's attraction is that it's an
enterprise-grade tool that doesn't demand enterprise-grade setup, admin and
training. It's probably overkill for a local football club or scout group,
however, or a small business with a limited number of coworkers; and a slightly
different approach may be more appropriate in the increasingly common scenario
of several autonomous workers contributing to a larger project.
P2 is a task management system that's
provided as a WordPress theme (p2theme.com). A rebuild of the Prologue theme
originally released in 2008, it lets team members keep their colleagues up to
date with progress they've made towards a common goal. The core WordPress
members themselves use a password-protected version of P2 (which is free of
charge) to keep up to date with what's happening across their distributed
workforce.
P2 is characterized by a large entry box at
the top of the screen, which immediately posts updates to the list below. These
can be commented on, and usefully you can subscribe to the updates using an app
such as Reeder ($4.85 from the Mac App Store, bit.ly/rbgOmz) or an online
alternative like Google Reader (google.com/reader).
Although it's not a dedicated task manager,
using P2 in a club environment, for example, would allow leaders to post lists
of jobs and delegates to post back progress updates over time using a familiar,
free and universally accessible tool.
IT'S USEFUL
TO distinguish task management from contact and relationship management,
which is a different kind of need and requires different approaches. If a large
proportion of your tasks are of the 'Call X about y' variety, where x is a
client or external contact rather than another member of your team, a CRM
(customer relationship management) system may be what you need.
Studiometry
Overview
You might associate CRM with businesses that
are specifically focused on large numbers of interactions with large numbers of
customers, such as sales departments, but software in this category takes
various forms and has a wide range of uses. Project management features tend to
be included, so you can kill two birds with one stone.
Examples include Base, Daylite and
Salesforce as well as more specialized tools such as Studiometry and
Streamtime, which are aimed at the creative industries. We'll be comparing
these solutions in an upcoming issue of MacUser.
