Teams and tasks are really the core of most projects. There are tools for the large enterprise like PlanView, Primavera, and Niku (now CA Clarity) and then there are tools (web-based) for smaller projects like Backpack (37 Signals) or Zoho Planner. There are also a number of tools that focus on the mid-market like Project.net, eProject, and @Task (AtTask).

@Task is one of those mid-market tools with a focus on the SMB (small, medium businees) with an emphasis on the “M.” When they briefed us on a new version they are releasing in a few weeks, what was apparent is that this is a tool that helps to support everyone on the team, from the individual contributor to the executive that needs oversight to coordinate for the whole organization.

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@Task Version 4.3 which will be released later this month adds a new AJAX –based front-end for increased personal and team productivity. Called IFT (Information Fast Tracking) the goal in this new version is to present information on the project in an easy-to-use Web 2.0 way (see figure 1).

The next revision of this due out late in Q1 2007 will also extend this AJAX front-end to help with connectivity to other programs and also support more communications and collaboration features. Build in J2EE, @Task offers both an SDK and an MDK (module development kit) allowing developers to export modules of @task into other aplications or vice versa. Version 4 was totally re-architected from the ground up to support better security, usability and Web 2.0 philosophy. Even the Gnatt charts are flash-based and interactive (see Figure 2).

The Next Step for Project Management

I had an interesting discussion with Abe Knell, who did the presentation and briefing for me about weather it is easier for a project management tool to add in collaboration features, (his belief) or for a collaboration tool to add in project management features (my belief). But in further thinking about it, it probably does not matter as long as the level of interaction (between people) in the context of the project goes up.

I like to use scenarios or use cases to not only examine the value of a certain feature, but also to see how well users relate to the scenario. Imagine you’re a contributor on a project and you are in the project space looking at a document and you have a question for one of the authors of the document. Today, the mechanism to deal with this is e-mail. You have to flag the document. Possibly highlight the area in question, and then e-mail your question to the author(s) in question, a process that could take days!

Now imagine the same scenario, but you had IM and Presence Detection integrated into the project software. You could see that one of the author’s is on Yahoo Messenger, you can ping them, ask your question, make the change to the document, and be done in a matter of minutes instead of days.

This is where RTC (real-time collaboration) tools really shine, in facilitating the interactions between those in a project, not cutting the task time down (although that may occur also). If you look at how the work really gets done on a project, it is the time in between the task work that really kills your schedule. If some of that inactive time can be made productive and cut way down, then the whole project will move faster.

It is interesting, that we have talked to many DPM vendors about this, many of which have conducted focus groups of their users and asked about this (including @task) and most users don’t seem to feel a need to integrate RTC into their DPM tools. One vendor we did get briefed on last year, started out with IM as part of their DPM tool is MediaChase’s IBN (Instant Business Network), and although most users have not listed this feature as critical, we believe that over the next year or so most DPM tools will either have RTC features bolted on, or be re-architected to integrate them because the time savings can be so great!