Organization of the workflow and its automation

G

ganouver2012-12-27 10:44:31

Business Informatics

ganouver, 2012-12-27 10:44:31

Good day to all!
Before the question, a little background.

In our small team, over the course of several years, a certain order of coordination of joint work has developed in an evolutionary way. Once a week we gather for a small meeting, select tasks for the next week from the pool, distribute them among ourselves and scatter to work. A week later, we meet again and sum up the results - what has been done, what has not been done and why, and the discussion smoothly flows to the selection of tasks for the next week. An important point is that we are talking primarily about business tasks, which are quite difficult to predict and organize in the form of regular processes.

It would seem that everything is simple, but it often happens that some activity involves the sequential execution of tasks by different performers. And this leads to unexpected difficulties. In particular, an ill-chosen sequence of tasks performed by one participant can lead to a drop in the productivity of the entire team.

Attempts to automate this process have not been very successful. Most popular systems (we tried Asana, Trac, Basecamp, looked towards Jira, Redmine) do not support scheduling based on dependencies between tasks. In the end, we settled on a strange hybrid solution - MS Project for dependency planning + Asana for current affairs, but using MS Project for an ever-changing set of tasks causes considerable annoyance.

And here are the unintentional questions:
Do we want something strange, or is it just that automation programs have not grown to the required level?
Do you have similar problems?

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6 answer(s)

P

Puma Thailand, 2012-12-27
@opium

It seems to me that the problem here is not in the control system, but in the heads.
It is possible, for example, that not everyone distributes tasks, but only one person. You can regulate the execution of tasks by setting successive deadlines, you can probably do a bunch of alternative actions to solve the problem.

I

Ingtar, 2012-12-27
@Ingtar

What about request trackers? The same Request Tracker allows you to seem to make some kind of chains similar ...

I

ixSci, 2012-12-27
@ixSci

Jira has relationships between issues: blocked by , related to etc.
Wouldn't it be possible to use this in planning?

I

ixSci, 2012-12-27
@ixSci

1. In the form of creation. Indeed, this item exists. Only in the form of editing: Link
2. I can't say anything, I haven't tried it.
3. A matter of taste. If you don’t use Jira, then for the sake of one feature it’s definitely not worth it.

S

sl4mmer, 2012-12-27
@sl4mmer

I advise you to try YourTrack. The second month I dragged the entire department to it =)

K

k_sashka, 2013-01-02
@k_sashka

The trouble is that most task systems are practically not designed for such tasks.
At one time, they screwed integration with ms project to jira for resource planning and task hierarchy.
All management was carried out in the project, and the developers received ready-made tasks in jira