When Should a Business Invest in Task Management Software?

"We're Doing Fine" Problem

When a startup starts growing, it's quite simple for it to communicate. It is sufficient to sit together with four people in one office and not use any enterprise solutions in order to understand what's going on with them. All you need to do is to turn your chair and ask, "Did you send that invoice?"

And in this situation, startups naturally resort to using ad-hoc software: WhatsApp, emails, and shared spreadsheets. As this solution works at the initial stage, management believes it to be scalable. And thus, it creates a very harmful illusion called "We're Doing Fine" problem.

But when a startup starts hiring more people and dealing with bigger clients, the mathematics of communication become quite different.

Brooks's Law and The Inflection Point

In software engineering, there exists an important notion called Brooks's Law, which holds that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." This phenomenon occurs due to the complexity of communication.

Whereas 4 members of a team would only create 6 lines of communication, 15 members will generate 105 lines of communication. If you scale up further to having 50 members, there exist more than 1,200 lines of communication where misunderstandings can happen.

If your business has not moved beyond manual tracking at this inflection point, everything starts slipping through the cracks right away.

3 Indicators That You Are Ready to Move Beyond Manual Tracking

Are you not sure whether you have reached an inflection point? Consider these three symptoms of dysfunctional operations:

1. The Era of Status Meetings
When your department managers spend more than three hours a week in status meetings, trying to figure out what the status of a certain project is, your operation system is not working right. Status meetings are an indication that there are blind workflows in place. With a proper digital environment in place, the management is supposed to know the status of every project right away.

2. The Problem of Dependencies
Every complex project requires a sequence. The marketing department cannot start a campaign until the design department completes the necessary assets. When the status of dependencies is tracked through emails, the marketing department is always checking back on whether the assets are completed. Specialized task software takes care of that by automatically notifying the next step in the process about the completion of the dependency.

3. Employee Burnout from "Context Switching"
If an employee needs to log into three separate chat applications as well as their email in order to find out what they need to do that day, then that employee is "context switching," a type of mental friction that prevents any form of deep work, causing high burnout levels.

The Unified Solution from Isaii Technologies

It's time to stop using spreadsheets and sticky notes to get organized and start thinking about the future of your business.

Isaii Technologies' Task Management Module was designed for the complexity of enterprise operations. By leveraging the power of Java and Spring Boot on the back-end, we've ensured the system can process thousands of concurrent tasks at once with no slowdowns. And because the application has a Flutter front-end, the experience will be seamless and native whether your employees are accessing their tasks via the desktop in the office or a mobile tablet out on the production line.

But the most important thing about our Task Management solution is that it doesn't exist in isolation. The module natively integrates into the other parts of the Isaii Technologies software suite, and a completed deal in the CRM module automatically generates a task list and assigns those tasks to the right account managers.

Stop managing tasks via post-it notes and Excel files.

Contact us today to learn more about how our customized Task Management software can bring clarity and efficiency to your workflows.