Email is so old school – in some respects, anyway. Although it’s been a ubiquitous communication tool in your personal life and at work for a over a decade now, it’s outdated in its ability to help you efficiently keep track of projects and processes which have complex requirements and deliverables. Continue reading to discover some new platforms that will enhance your ability to keep track of action items and improve the overall performance of your project team.
A brief history of email
The concept of email is over fifty years old. It’s pretty rudimentary; it provides the ability to compose, send, and receive bytes of information via a network protocol. Over the years, it evolved from various small-scale proprietary systems over local networks to a universal store-and-forward model where users can send and receive messages anytime, from anywhere, over the Internet.
Over the past two decades, email clients and services, like Outlook, Yahoo!, and Gmail, have refined the way we organize and operate our email accounts. They’ve also integrated features like calendar widgets and contact lists.
Why so old school?
Although it’s a widely used and preferred medium, email can be frustrating. To prove my point, I’ve compiled a list of common complaints, from around my office, and around the web:
Bloated inboxes. By default, emails from every type of sender – be it clients, coworkers, vendors, services, or marketers – arrive in one place. This can cause inbox overcrowding and can be potentially overwhelming when it comes to prioritizing.
Inaccurate subject lines. Email threads on one topic quickly grow to involve sub-topics and tangents. Repliers often forget to update subject lines, or completely wrong subject lines are used based on message content. These mistakes make it difficult to follow-up on specific action items, and potentially cause information to be missed or lost.
Brevity. Emails don’t have structured templates; users are given an open canvas to write as much as they want, in any fashion. Often messages are more drawn out than they need to be, and they usually lack consistency in formatting, making it a pain to visually distinguish important information.
Authentication. There’s a lack of control over whose messages can show up in your email inbox. Anyone can send you an email; there’s no verification process that limits sending from people who know your address.
Attachment restrictions. Most email services have restrictions on how big file attachments can be. Mail clients also behave differently when it comes to previewing and downloading files, leading to inconsistent user experiences.
With all of these issues identified, I find it difficult to understand why email is still so ubiquitous. But that’s me; I’m a tech savvy early adopter.
In hindsight, I realize it’s difficult to innovate when there is no one global body in charge of ‘email development’, and when services need to be backward-compatible with so many platforms. This is where online project management apps come in.
How to better track action items
Action items are the lifeblood of any project or process. Without them, nothing would ever be accomplished. Progress tracking, deadline reminders, automatically generated calendars, version control, task assignment, task aggregation, and a host of other action-item-related features are available in a number of online apps. Below, I explore two online services that are currently in-use at my office, and are increasingly being adopted across the greater business community. Both are robust, customizable, and come optimized for desktop and mobile use.
Trello (https://trello.com) offers a clean and easy way to define tasks, share and assign, and track progress. It uses the notion of boards, columns and cards – boards to define projects or processes, columns to define task states (e.g. backlog, in-progress, complete), and cards to define individual tasks. Cards can be assigned to users and then easily dragged across columns as their statuses change. It’s great for both business and personal use. And best of all, it’s free!
JIRA (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira) is the quintessential service for complex technical projects and product development. It’s used extensively in the software and app development industry. Meant for a more advanced user base, it allows teams to work in an agile project environment, as opposed to traditional waterfall. It gives managers tools like dashboards and priority settings so they can better evaluate, plan, and prioritize fixes and features.
In my experience, the challenge with rolling out new tools like these isn’t so much learning how to use them, but the eagerness to adopt. It’s always difficult to get team members to start a new process. To overcome this, leaders need to drive the change by being champions of the new service and repeatedly expressing its advantages.
