I have been using Deskaway (DA) for the last 6 months. Having used Base Camp and Zoho for a while in the past, I migrated to DA and the experience has been better than the other two.

As part of my professional work, I not only use DA to collaborate and coordinate within my company (MVP), but I also have the responsibility of getting all the companies as part of our Portfolio on DA. This is a huge challenge, especially because various teams or individuals have their own methods of dealing with projects, tasks and their work in all.

Here’s a technique I used to get a portfolio company- a startup onto DA, very recently:

The CEO, lets call him Mike, is someone who believes that making lists on paper is a good way of tracking his personal tasks, meeting deadlines and achieving milestones. And this method is loosely followed by others in his team. I believe that it’s a great start (considering that I have met many people in responsible positions in large companies, who do not use even physical lists). This method worked really well for Mike and his team, when they were starting off their company. Today, the business has grown considerably and Mike has to manage a total of 2 teams and 10 people with different tasks, different clients, varied work times and multiple locations. Soon, I noticed that a few important tasks were being forgotten and deadlines were slipping.

I had spoken to Mike about DA in the past and had casually tried to get him and his team onto DA, but in vain. This time, I employed a different method.

Everyone who has worked on a project/ assignment individually or in groups understands the following:

- Tasks: Things to do
- Milestones: Things to achieve before a particular date / Important Dates

With this as the basis, I explained to Mike the importance of having a tool to track the things he needs to do that will help him achieve his milestones and progress in his projects. I used the below representation to explain and get Mike on DA

The premise here is that when you have any project ( Any activity that has a definitive business outcome. It can be anything from what a team is working on internally to a client assignment) to execute at hand, there are a few important dates attached to it. This can be release of a new website, launch of a new product, publishing the next magazine edition, etc. These are Milestones.  Attached to these Milestones are various tasks. These are things-to-do that help achieve the important dates. All these tasks collectively make a Task List.

So basically you can create a New Project on DA, let’s call it “Marketing Website”. One important Milestone attached to this is “Beta Launch on 1 Jan, 2009″. There are a set of tasks that are required to be done to achieve this milestone, these make for Task Lists (TL) - Product Development TL, Technology Development TL, Marketing TL. Each of these TL has a set of tasks listed below it.

It’s very simple. You could add more details to each task by attaching a start date/ end date, how long the task will take, assigning it to a team member, adding comments and sending yourself email reminders for the same.

Mike and his teammates have now started using DA to plan and manage their tasks. It has organized their work to a large extent. They are taking on more initiatives as a company now, since they have a tool that helps them plan and execute.

Mike now has better visibility on what is happening across teams in the company, as he gets a snapshot view of what everyone is working on and can monitor the Project’s health on a daily basis on DA. Mike now has enabled the “Automatic Email Reminder” option - this generates daily email updates to him and his team about their approaching deadlines and over due tasks.

Now, Mike and his team look at the My Tasks Tab on their DA dashboard to see what they have to do, instead of looking into their handwritten lists, depending upon their memories or waiting on their manager or teammate to assign them a task!

So, getting started on DA is as easy as listing your tasks on an excel sheet or on paper! Only, DA has many more advantages in helping you deal with multiple and complex projects.

Have you been successful in getting your team to use DA regularly? Please share your adoption techniques. Are you one of those who have repeatedly tried but have not been able to get your team to use DA? Do let us know what the reasons are or common complaints are.

I read an interesting comment by someone last night about how project management tools should mirror current reality. This is absolutely true. What is happening currently? Who is doing what? Did the client like the new banner that we showed them? No? Why not? Capturing inter and intra-workplace conversations can eventually become your project health yardstick.
Would you want to know how your Gantt charts and plans look that you created 2 weeks back or would you want to know what is happening within your project today and how its going to impact tomorrow?

Imagine you are on a holiday, a much needed getaway from work and suddenly at 11 in the night you get a call from your manager, who is in the other part of the globe. He wants you to upload a business critical file, onto the company intranet for an important client presentation due in the next one hour!

You get to your laptop and try to access your company’s VPN. It is slow to connect and finally turns an “access is denied due to an unscheduled downtime!” There is no way you can upload the file, and you are unable to reach any other employee who may have access to the file.

You are in a remote location, and your vacation is screwed!

Now, imagine the same situation and consider that you were using an online collaboration tool: You save yours and the company’s valuable, billable time by simply accessing the Internet from your hotel. You would log in to the online collaboration Web site, and just send the sought-after file to your manager. Better yet, you ask him to access the section where files are shared on the online collaboration tool and get the file himself.

Wow! It just takes you 15 minutes to go back to your well deserved vacation mode!

Nowadays, online collaboration tools include features such as:

• professional email integration
• document management
• project management
• shared calendaring
• contact management

A highly cost-effective, online collaboration solution is a carefree alternative to the anxieties and costs inherent with supporting complex collaboration software.

During cost-cutting periods, online collaboration tools offer you the following advantages:

• They allow your employees, customers, and partners to share critical business information with one another from anywhere in the world at relatively lower prices.
• Apart from the one-time or annual payment for using the online collaboration tool, the only money you pay is for an Internet connection!
• Small- to medium-sized businesses benefit from hosted collaboration solutions because there’s no software to install and no servers to maintain, ever!
• The often easy-to-use, intuitive, and self-explanatory user interface of most online collaboration tools makes it faster to get acclimatized to. Your employees don’t need training to start using the online tool like you would require before you take a peek at MS SharePoint, MS VSS, and MS Project.

Online collaboration tools offer you big business collaboration at small business price. Mostly, you can access online collaboration tools for a low monthly fee. You just need to simply add new members as and when your business grows. You do not pay salaries for system administrators, maintenance engineers, and network administrators. You do not need an employee to lose his/ her critical productive hours updating/ arranging information in alternative project management software.

The online tools’ service providers provide you with quick setup and deployment models. They require no IT support. It works across any platform - PC or Mac. Plus, the service provider offers free support, training, and upgrades for life! You save more time and money than you can imagine.