Hello everyone,
We (few of my friends and myself) have stumbled upon a common problem we face everyday in our work life – Managing teams and bosses. Have shared a little bit of context, pain point hypothesis and potential solution around limited area of “task or deliverable management” here.Would be very kind of you if you could share your 2 cents on the idea here. Here we go –
Context
Most software/IT firms use project management apps, to tightly manage tasks, resources and project costs/timeline. However, most other sectors – telecom, automotive, FMCG, other industrials, electrical, services, pharma, corporate offices – continue to, primarily use in-person meetings or phone calls or emails or excel sheets on email to assign and track team deliverable. While nothing beats, in-person meeting or voice calls to make team understand the tasks to be performed, but often things get lost, due to lack of recording these over an appropriate platform to reference and review till closure.
Pain point (hypothesis)
1. CEO pain point – Lack of alignment between short term strategy and tactical deliverable assigned by managers to teams; lack of tech enabled tools for CEO’s office to drive implementation of mid/long term strategy imperatives; limited ability to triangulate facts as reported by first/second line of reportees
2. Manager pain point – Difficult to monitor & control e-mail based tasking/tracking of deliverable, key decisions; lack of tactical clarity to team member on his/her task for the day/week/month; lack of accountability in the team to complete set of dels within stipulated time
3. Team member pain point – Lack of objectivity/clarity in tasks assigned by manager; lack of support – in terms of decision making on part of manager or dependence on other teams to complete a task; limited or no feedback from managers- both positive and negative (strength based feedback or opportunity for improvement)
4. Most importantly, aren’t most project management apps are pretty boring and pain themselves for the user!
Potential solution
Simple and fun to use, intuitive application – keeping in mind non-IT/software folks – where user (CEO, manager or team member) can do following – create team, create & prioritize deliverable for the week, assign deliverable to his/her team, seek update on task, share update on task, change tasks’ completion status, broadcast messages, raise red flags (upward delegation) to seek resource/decision support, send review invite etc.
Idea is to enhance team morale and productivity by bringing in very high degree of FQ (Fun Quotient), accountability, objectivity, agility and transparency within business teams through tech-enablement.
Key Questions
1. Are these pain points real? Do you really face these issues in managing your teams?
2 What is the single biggest pain point you face in assigning/tracking tasks/deliverable to your team?.
3. Any other point of view…comment on problem here.
We are more excited to identify and understand the problem here ..than looking for the solution. Would really appreciate your point of view.
Cheers!
Vinay
