Creating a Killer Task Management Workflow

To help improve communications from our two-person communication team to the much larger church staff, we’ve recently implemented a new job workflow. While I know many people are happily using other tools, like Basecamp, we’ve found other solutions to be lacking in some of the key features that are important to our process.

Here’s our new workflow:

1) Ticket Origination via Web Form

This part is nothing new to our organization. For over a year we’ve had a centralized location where our staff can place  IT, graphic, video, or facility requests through an online site. (We use MachForm for our web forms.)

What’s new, is the way graphic and website requests are routed from that point forward.

2) Task Automatically Created in Project Management System

When the request form is submitted, that email ticket is set up to automatically generate a new task in Producteev, which we’re using as a task/project manager. We recently switched to Producteev because of its simplicity coupled with its impressive feature set and API. (But yes, I hate their logo.)

3) The Person Who Created the Ticket is Redirected to a Status Update Page

Status Update Page

This is my favorite part: Using the Producteev API, we redirect the staff person who created the ticket to a page that shows all the open and recently completed tickets on which our team is working. This includes the current status of each task, which we can update through tags in Producteev.

Overview

While I assume this system might not work well for every staff, we’ve already found it to be very helpful to ours for a number of reasons:

  1. All requests are centrally located.
  2. There are no required logins for a staff person to create a new ticket.
  3. Anyone on our staff can easily see the status of all projects.
  4. Status tags are simple to update, and since its integrated with our task management, it’s a seamless process for our communications team.

4 thoughts on “Creating a Killer Task Management Workflow

  1. Neat tool. Seems easy to use and great way to see what’s going on.

    Two people team, huh? Seems to me that Heather Burson has a lot of tickets that she is actually working on while Mr. Gilbert has one and he is not sure about what to do with it.

  2. Hey this is a great post, but I’m wondering if you can share a little more about how you set up the page with the project status for your staff? I’m not to well versed on using APIs to set up that kind of stuff on my own. We’ve been looking to streamline our work flow and a system like this might be good option for us. Feel free to email me if it’s too much info for the comments.

  3. Jeremy, we contracted with a developer to build this for us, and since our server is running ColdFusion, there’s a good chance that the code wouldn’t be helpful for you. I mostly posted it here for a proof of concept for those who are interested.

    However, if you do happen to be running ColdFusion on your server, I’d be glad to send you our code, so just let me know.

    And BTW, we’re still very pleased with the way this is working for us. It appears to be a very solid long term solution.

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