Ever-growing Management stack

Shreyas Gupta

Progress Update

Is the project management platform market saturated?

The SaaS industry is a mess with around 350+ services available for project management, with more being added every day [1]. With such saturation, the industry has shifted to catering more granular needs and requirements of users, increasing the tool stack on modern team, especially those who are collaborating remotely. 

Overview

Various project management frameworks are employed and suggested in academic literature for teams based on the kind of project they are working on (event management, software development, team competition/hackathons etc) (Getz 1997, smith 2017). Methodologies like agile development, scrum, kanban etc require adopting teams to be familiar with its nitty gritty and being formally educated about it (Altassian coach)

Task delegation in a collaborative space is an integral part of team management. Various factors like individual autonomy, urgency of the task and platform compatibility comes affect how effectively teams progress (Slack white paper 2019, B Victoria et al 2004). A brief look at studies conducted on existing SaaS Platforms tells us effective task management requires prior experience in managing teams (Brian Faust, rindle). 

Based on feedback from professor, literature review, and having worked in multiple teams, I found managing my personal work and the organisational platform stack, and collaboration very complicated. I decided to dive deep and investigate the problems curtailing existing SaaS products, understand management practices and problems in modern teams of various scales. 

Specifically explore two areas

1. How can we help novice teams with inexperienced members manage their project well without failing and learning?
2. How are people adopting various tools/platforms/methods into their lifestyle and how are they failing them. 

Area of Focus

User Study

Decided to study two primary cohorts

1. Students and individuals who have little to no management experience.
2. Members of established organisations which have a prescribed methodology for project management.  

This was done through remote interviews which were recorded and later analysed. 5 participants have been interviewed so far, with 3 more participants yet to be interviewed. 

1. Which organisation/teams did/project did you work for/on? How old is the organisation? How many people work in it? What was your role and designation? What are the different avenues/mini teams present in your organisation?
2. User demographics? How long have they been working in the organisation?
3. What are the tools/tech stack and methodologies used in your organisation? How long has it been since you adopted them? How often do you change them? Can you briefly go through the timeline of how you do things?
4. Would you say the work in your organisation is framework oriented (using Kanban boards, project reports, milestone schedule, project plans and timelines etc) or communication oriented (lot of back and forth communication with team members on various groups for task acknowledgments and progress tracking)?
5. What level of uncertainty is present in your event/project on the onset? How much non-linearity and uncertainty is present/how often do team members adapt to situations as they come vs trying to follow a clear plan-based approach?
6. How do you delegate tasks to team members? How do you follow up on tasks? How do you do knowledge management? 
7. What kind of problems do you usually face when delegating tasks? What do you think the problem is (motivation, incentives, lack of talent, communication gap etc)?
8. How long do team members stay involved in the project? How often do you roll out forms for fresh recruits? Does your organisation prefer getting work done locally or outsource/freelance them? 
9. How do you schedule meetings? 
10. Have you guys ever conducted a virtual/remote event? If so, how different are things in such cases? (In terms of tech stack, meeting schedules, work delegation etc)
11. Do you evaluate your project once it’s finished? If so, how do you go about it?

Interview Guide

Some quotes from the interviews

P1 - "My major issue was that people wouldn't respond on slack  or any chat platform, mostly because of their complex notification management system",

"The platform plugins work but I didn't have time to explore how it works", "People had to be reminded to update their knowledge base (google drive), would've been appreciated if there was a easier method",

"Using an existing platform which is a little uncomfortable is better than using a new platform which you need to learn"

P2 - "We didn't have proper hierarchies for reporting work and communicating. We were successful later on but it was hard to establish"

"Whiteboarding and taking photos, along with google sheets was our stack, someone would convert it into an excel sheet and say this is the plan"

P3 - "When sharing links about documents, references with the team, the platform doesn't organise it well to go back and contextually understand what the link is"

P4 - "As we had little idea on how to do things, we tried out many ways to manage the project but none of them worked well. We also didn't have much guidance from seniors"

Findings

• P4 Whiteboard discussions are very common among teams and mini avenues for brainstorming. 
• P1 Communication with individuals, vendors, outsourcing and stakeholders outside the team breaks organisational patterns. 
• P3 Establishing hierarchy and chain of command is difficult, especially when seniority comes into play. 
• P1, P2, P4 Inhibition in team members to incorporate change in methodologies. 
• P1, P2 Updates and notifications from various tool stacks is hard to manage. Customisation options for the same are very complex.
• P4 P5 Managing personal projects and tasks along with organisation related work is difficult. 
• Personal knowledge management/note-taking is done through a variety of ways, using WhatsApp, notion, GitHub projects etc. 

Findings

• For newly established teams, getting help and mentorship about how to get work done efficiently and getting their doubts and queries clarified is difficult.
• P1 P2 Participants complained about proper connectivity between task management tools like kanban boards and communication tools like Slack. 
• P1 P2 P4 P5 organisers/core team members try out various methods to organise work, fail and abandon projects. 
• No discoverability of plugins on various platforms, which greatly diminishes the extrinsic value of the tool. 

Personas

Amir

• Senior student involved in various extra-curricular activities and programs
• Prefers analog modes for collaborating and brainstorming
• Is very rigid about changes in lifestyle. 
• Is extremely organised with day to day work 
• Overwhelmed with technological interventions

24 years

Goals

Problems

• Manage his organisation effectively
• Learn from his peers and mentors

Text

Personas

Rhea

• Sophomore Student who has little experience in working in a team and collaborating. 
• Is enthusiastic about trying out new products and solutions.
• Isn't very organised and disciplined, prefers to do things on a deadline basis.

19 years

1. Ideate ways for effective brainstorming
2. How can one improve notification handling and make customisation options powerful yet simple
3. Whats the best way of combining chat and task delegation?
4. How can we improve UX of platform plugins?
5. Can we create templating scheme for handing off base organisational structure for novice teams?

Areas to explore

Upcoming updates

1. Interviews with individuals involved in established organisations (This coming weekend)
2. A thorough heuristic evaluation of popular SaaS products used by teams, to identify differences and pitfalls. 

Getz Donald. 1997. Event Management & Event Tourism. New York. Cognizant Communication Corporation 

Smith Emma, The key to successful event planning: A case study of identifying the most appropriate model of event planning, 2017, https://repository.cardiffmet.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10369/8717/Emma%20Smith%20Dissertation.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Brian Faust, Why we are building yet another task management platform, https://hello.rindle.com/why-were-building-yet-another-task-management-platform/

Studies of Task Management Towards the Design of a Personal Task List Manager, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.464.5718&rep=rep1&type=pdf

https://www.atlassian.com/agile