Real time situations at work

Smaller companies or teams face these situations the most

I hope this piece will resonate with each one of you who is reading it as it shares real time situations at work that we may have gone through or heard about often. The idea here is really to gain out of it and find a solution to overcome.

Your team is small but work never finishes; that’s alright as long as it is all under control. Out of the blues, one day when your colleague decides to move out you will find that hard to swallow, in shock thinking of the situation at work, you even forget to congratulate her on the new venture. Your next 10 days or even a month or more will be spent on doing what?

• Tracking all activities, tasks that were assigned and controlled by your collegue
• Locating important files in her desktop folders, email, CDs and other places
• Managing all data and finding place to store it properly, online or offline
• Getting organized to understand the work better so that there are no delays in reporting
• Surfing through her emails for keep a tab on latest messages and files exchanged with client and others
• Trying to pacify aggressive clients and assuring them quality service, especially when the ball is dropped on certain key issues that matter to the client the most
• Hand-holding newcomer to the role and spending time in meetings

That’s a hell lot of productive time consumed into unproductive work.

The solution: Need for better collaboration on team, data and communication on a common platform and a consistent folder structure to hold all data.

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Your team is multitasking always, networking with clients, colleagues, and other stakeholders (media, vendor…) on chat, linked in, social media to get some breakthroughs. You are indeed proud of your team, as each employee pays attention to one-to-one relationships for better engagements, conversions and network. However, there is no seamless communication happening here. As a result, all exchanges taking place across multiple communication channels are getting scattered. For review reports and updates on your activities, you will be spending the next 2 days or more on doing what?

• Surfing through social media, emails, chats, sms to track information
• Managing communications through many windows
• Remembering and keeping a  tab on what information is sent and to whom from time to time
• Also personal chats in workplace takes away your time from important work
• Is it really helping you work effectively?

The solution: A one stop solution for all your communication and information needs.

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You find timesheets really monotonous and time-consuming but you have to fill them and there are no two ways about it. With so much already on your plate, there is really no time to perform this added task of filling timesheets. It is not your management putting that pressure on you but your clients who want to know for how many hours of constructive work they are being billed. More importantly because you may not be the only dedicated person working on a particular client account but working partly for a number of clients and projects. Worst-to-worst your salary can be put on hold if the timesheets are not filled and closed in time. So for all those who are irregular on this front will find it doubly hard when they do it for the entire month or two weeks in a stretch. You will be spending your weekend doing timesheets and what will it result in?

• Weekend gone and no time to relax and rejuvenate
• Due to the monotonous nature of work, careless in filling them
• Spending time in hunting all activities and tasks
• Spending time on finding out how much time spent on those activities and tasks
• Spending time going through your organizer and calendar for details
• Missing data on some activities or tasks
• A lot of work or efforts put in can go unnoticed
• Chances that you will go wrong in filling them when you do it after a long interval
• Inaccurate reporting for management and client
• Load on the server when many employees are sitting doing the same thing in one time
• Salary on hold till you finish working on them
• Chances that your boss may not approve on some entries reported
• Overlapping of time involved for a team on a single project

Can you afford to work in such a haphazard way?

The solution: You need timesheets to be an intrinsic part of your activity and tasks. The timesheets have to be extremely simple and easy to use, just like 1-2-3 and done. You need a solution online, where you can access all your data, collegues and communications related to your work at all times and from anywhere in the world.

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Your work involves a lot of documentation. It can be contracts if you’re a legal firm, or accounting spreadsheets if you are a financial firm, press releases for a PR agency, creatives for ad agency and articles for news services or content writers so on and so forth.  Revisions, changes etc. are very common to any documentation work. Most of the times seen across businesses, all communication, discussions, feedbacks and revisions to do with any document are through emails. Meaning, many email exchanges taking place and some irrelevant ones also. After few weeks or months, when you want to refer to the final document or a particular revised document, your 2-3 hours are spent in doing what?

• Hunting the document in your desktop folder
• If you are not in office or don’t have your laptop, you cannot do much except to take assistance of your collegue
• Or, search in web mails or e-mails on phone
• Check through your emails and sift through the long chain mails with a common subject line
• Go through all communication that transpired to find the relevant information
• If you have happened to delete some of your mails in the inbox, then take assistance from your colleague or boss or client to get you the information you need
• With multiple versions that you keep renaming, chances are that you may use the outdated or wrong version from the many copies floating in your emails or folders.

Just look at the amount of time that is going into doing something totally unproductive, plus even after all this hard work, if you use or send out a wrong document to someone you will be held.

The solution: You need automation to help you get organized at work. So that all your folders are consistently structured with all your documents and there is a version history maintained for all the files and documents you upload. If this is made possible by an online solution, you can access all data irrespective of where you are and at what time.

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Have you ever sent out a heavy presentation file or an image or a creative or a press clipping to your colleague(s) or boss without realizing or checking the size of the file?  By mistake, you just clogged the mailbox of the recipients and got shouting for it. Next time, you are careful and therefore either chose gmail for heavy attachment mails or a link from yousendit.com. Nothing really wrong with it except, that using gmail your communication is from a personal account and not an official account, and that your yousendit link will also expire soon if not checked or downloaded in time. If you have to mail the file to a colleague or someone in the same office location, then you can also put it in the shared drive but don’t be surprised if the drive is wiped out one fine day. There are always ways to get around things but they are not the best of ways.

The consequences: Using too many channels to communicate not only leads to information getting scattered and thus, more difficulty in tracking information later but also, it definitely does not sound professional!

Just imagine the amount of time you will take looking for your files, trouble of sending heavy files,  time taken to download them, etc.

The solution: Act professional! You need a solution for heavy file sharing, where your recipient can download the information with ease and even at a later date, without having to worry about file validity. You set the expiry date for the file depending on the requirement and then there no need to resort to personal email accounts for this job.

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These issues will carry on and only eat up the productive time. Remember that Time is Money. With this quote, think of how you can maximize output by adopting the best solution at work.

The solution: To pay attention to higher priority work and save time on replication, needless searching and bookkeeping job. Let automation, application like TaskTrek help you work smarter.

TaskTrek gets a thumbs up by Pluggd.in

TaskTrek Helps You Manage Task And Collaborate Better

India's Largest Technology Site/Platform For Entrepreneurs, PluGGd.in [also called 'PI'] profiles Technology Startups and is India's largest visibility platform for technology startups and entrepreneurs.


http://www.pluggd.in/task-project-management-software-tasktrek-297/

Excerpts from the TaskTrek review by Pluggd.in

"If you are an organization that is looking for better collaboration across the team members, do give TaskTrek a spin. There are quite a few standalone products available in the market (for project management, task management etc), but very few of them provide a holistic view."

"We played with the product and must say that it’s very well thought-out and covers most of the use case, an enterprise would need."

"There are quite a few web based project management software, but growing teams need a much simplified task management service that enables collaboration across different teams in a company."

New version of TaskTrek launches

Today is an important day for TaskTrek.

After its formal launch in July last year, TaskTrek has gone through a drastic change in terms of development. The new TaskTrek, is class apart.

I still remember my first demo with JWT when TaskTrek was newly launched. JWT approached us and we were thrilled but little we knew the colossal task ahead in terms of customization.  In one year, we have not only made TaskTrek most suitable for Indian clients but positioned it for SMEs, so that startups and small companies can use it to their benefit right away in a cost that is very much thinkable.

So, another new version of TaskTrek is here. It brings with it new features like:

• Save custom settings or custom view – with advance filter options available on TaskTrek dashboard, you filter in to view the information you need and save that as a setting. Likewise, you can have multiple custom views available from the dashboard. E.g. custom view (a) to see all information (messages, files, progress,  queries) related to a person in the last 6 months on a particular project; custom view(b) to see all information related to a project in the last 3 months, so on

• Top 15 Projects – Quick & easy access to top 15 Projects or Activities with  action tools (add a message, add a file, raise a question, log hours, edit, set status, copy / move, etc) available on the dashboard itself

• Top 15 Tasks – Quick & easy access to top 15 Tasks or sub-activities with  action tools (add a message, add a file, raise a question, log hours, edit, set status, copy / move, etc) available on the dashboard itself

Bottom line: TaskTrek dashboard is the only and only place you need, to share, manage, control, track, monitor for all your work and there is really no moving from one screen to the other or use multiple softwares.

We will soon be releasing an update mailer to talk about this version of TaskTrek.

Growing up!

I realized only today that TaskTrek has really grown big, in terms of the value it is giving to its users.

Today, it boasts of some 38 odd features making it more robust, holistic and fruitful in managing businesses. Even after so many advancements in the application, I don't think there is a overdoing or complexity involved in any ways from an end-users point.

Easily one can start using and achieve a lot more from it.

Each feature in-built is instrumental in simplifying work life. Without hesitation, one should really try out and see the difference it makes and enjoy work than feeling stressed about the overload and mis management at work that often takes a toll on our lives.

The intention is really to reach out to numbers and make technology simple by giving every professional a chance to use.

TaskTrek is not just a service or a product, it is a change and a revolution in the way we work today and will work tomorrow. At a concept level, TaskTrek if adopted and used regularly by any team will mark significant change in the business of client.