In the last post we explained why we think PaT is the best training building platform in the world and is so effective that we guarantee results. In this post we explain why we think PaT is is the best Task Management system in the world.

The task management capability in PaT has a number of key features that separate it from the competition:

1. Auto Opt-In.
   1. As part an organisations PaT community,  users automatically accept tasks regardless of whether they want them or not. If they don’t want them or they need to negotiate a later deadline. Based on a previous agreement that they have already agreed to (as one of the PaT induction modules), the onus is on PaT users to use specially provided forums which helps organisations achieve outstanding communication around tasks. People with high task integrity/management skills already, find this unique approach brilliant as it supports their existing Modus Operandi which is a  key reason they are already high performers, for others it provides a crystal clear framework to lift their task management skills to a high performing level.
2. Deadline Negotiation forum.
   If you are unable to complete a task on the proposed deadline you simply negotiate a new date, if the deadline extension request is received within 24 hours nothing happens. However if the deadline negotiation is received after 24 hours then the deferral is counted.

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   The idea is this. People who are on top of their workload get good at knowing what they can do and when, they provide reliable deadline feedback to team members that enable strategies to get executed with a high degree of predictability (which is the holy grail for every business). These are A-team people. A-teamers also communicate any deadline challenges early to help project/task owners to restrategise on the fly and mitigate potential threats that missed deadlines usually present before they become an issue, a key reason why A-teamers are always valued higher than other staff. They rarely miss deadlines or apologise or offer excuses. PaT mimics this process of high performing individuals and provides transparency around it enabling a tool for an entire organization to lift their a-game.

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   PaT records deadline deferrals as part of a Task Integrity KPI. In this users Task Integrity KPI the overall score is 91.46% (a high achiever, literally you have a 92% probability this person will deliver on their commitments). The score of 91.64% is made up of two task types. Tasks that were completed within the original deadline (On time) and tasks that were completed within a newly negotiated deadline (Deferred). PaT regards both scenarios as a pass. A deferred deadline has to be agreed by the original task assignor so that means a conversation has occurred and the new deadline has been agreed.

   The power of monitoring deferrals is in discovering recidivist deferrers. These are people who either need coaching – whereby PaT now provides the proof to start this journey or they are struggling for resource in which case this data provides the business case so it is a wonderful tool that helps both the users and the organization understand  factually what strategies need to be employed to increase capability.

3. Task Rejection forum. Similar to the Deadline Negotiation forum in that task assignees are compelled to maintain a high performance metric now that it is a known measurement therefore to protect this KPI if they feel they can’t fulfill the task or it shouldn’t be their task to manage they use this to quickly lob the job back to from whence it came.
4. Auto Escalation (AE). We covered this in the previous post (point 3) explaining this is easily one of the most powerful features of PaT and why. Click here to read this again . AE guarantees outcomes or the CEO (or nominated Senior Manager) is notified – this invariably happens in a new PaT instillation however it usually only happens once or twice after a few..pointed…discussions.
5. OOF (Out Of Office). In October 2016 we are releasing the new OOF function, this works in conjunction with the performance KPI and allows users to specify when they are unable to receive tasks.  You can also schedule and split tasks over different different time slots to manage tasks – yes we will be building a two way sync with outlook a key design philosophy of PaT is that it can be used as a business management platform – at SCS we are depreciating email internally in favour of communication in PaT via tasks and forums because of the accountability  and transparency PaT provides. Extending the platform to this degree wont be for everyone but we’re discovering this is better way to manage multiple tasks and projects than email and spreadsheets.
6. Sub-tasks. Whilst you can create sub-tasks in PaT we discovered large projects with lots of tasks and sub-tasks can get complicated … they develop what we were calling task trees. We found a better way to manage complex inter-related tasks was through another awesome feature of PaT we call strategy documents. We’ll cover this off in a future post however the key idea is that strategy documents become collections of tasks and tasks can spawn nested strategy documents (linked to the parent) which in turn can contain multiple tasks. This way complex projects can be broken into logical sections making project management easier than anything we’ve found to date, we now use this technology to manage everything from staff reviews to detailed move plans to sophisticated IT migration projects. We even use this to create PaT development roadmaps.
7. Multi media. You can attach images, rich documents, files and videos to tasks.
8. Mobile and quick. Raising tasks on the PaT smartphone app is fast and fun. Walking around and you see something you need to do? whip out your smartphone, create a new task, take a photo of the item and use the google voice to text translator (which is spookily accurate) to dictate your message. In time test trials we repeatedly prove using the PaT smartphone app to raise tasks is at least 2 times faster than the traditional method of typing an email (emails of course has no accountability, automation, reporting capability or sub task capability).
9. Dictaphone. Again using the PaT smartphone app you can create voice recordings and attach them to a task.
10. Reminders. Create and queue reminders to alert you of looming task deadlines so that you never get caught out.

Comparing like for like we have not found any task management program that offers not only the depth of functionality we’ve built into PaT but delivers results and brings around the behavioural change to evolve an organisations overall task management capability. The key difference we believe is that PaT is a system, it not just a Task Management solution or a Training platform, in fact it is currently 10 HR tools all beautifully integrated into one dynamic system, which will continue to explore in future posts.

We don’t have a demo site up and running yet however this is due to be released for Go Live in Q1 next year, in the meantime if you’d like to learn more about PaT or you’re interested in understanding how specifically PaT could assist your business drop me a line at brad@peopleandtasks.com I can arrange to run you through the software and demonstrate the functionality using Team Viewer or get one of our team to come and present it you in person. Whilst PaT is in soft launch phase (Go Live is planned for Q1 2017) we are offering preferential pricing in perpetuity as a founding customer and if you are an SCS customer we are offering brilliant deals as a special thank you for your custom and support.

Cheers

Brad