Pillar 6: Enterprise Action Management, Apr 29

(PDF, 10 pages, 1084 KB)

"Teams need a way of tracking outstanding action points that gives shared visibility regarding who is doing what, and explicitly links next actions to team goals and enterprise mandates. Emails, meetings, threaded discussions and videoconferences give rise to tasks that team members have to do. There is a disconnect in today’s systems, however, between the tracking and management of outstanding next actions at the enterprise, group, and individual levels. Individuals create their own next actions based on team goals, but have no simple way of associating their next actions with the mandates of the team. Put in reverse, the team manager or project leader cannot see a consolidated list of the next actions that individuals are working on in the context of the team’s goals and priorities. Tasks and next actions are stored in different applications that do not communicate with each other."

For people to get things done at the office, they need to know what they should be getting done. This self-evident truth applies even more when a group of people are working together toward a jointly agreed outcome. If they don’t know what they should be doing, or if there is a lack of clarity as to who should be doing it, then the team’s efforts will be stymied. For the benefit of the individuals on the team, the team itself, the management structure around the team, and whoever else has an interest in what the team is supposed to be delivering, clarity about intended actions is vital.

Pillar 6 of the IT-Enabled Team Productivity series considers how tasks and action items are managed in today’s enterprises. It is based on the assumption that having a single consolidated task list for each individual is a good idea because it enables the person to select the most appropriate thing to do next.

This paper discusses:

• The Situation Today ... details what team members have to do today to work with assigned and delegated tasks, and why it is mostly bad.


• Negative Effects on Team Productivity ... as a result of having insufficient tools for tracking and managing action across the enterprise.


• Case Study ... about how Microsoft shows how not to do task consolidation between Project 2003 and Outlook 2003.


• The Ideal Future Situation ... a set of requirements for optimizing the management of action and tasks across the enterprise.


• Positive Effects for Team Productivity ... in what ways do teams get benefit as a result of having an enterprise action management system.


• Technologies to Consider ... how Documentum eRoom and Vignette Collaboration Server go some way toward addressing the requirements.

What's Next
There is one final Pillar to address in this series on what teams need from IT systems in order to be productive in their work, and that's Pillar 7 about broadening the network through automatic discovery services, finding new people who possess appropriate skill, expertise and focus to contribute to the team. As I write that, please feel free to drop me an email if you have feedback or comments on this Pillar. In particular, does your organization have an enterprise action management system that meets the requirements I've outlined here?