Task Manager

Google Apps is quite useful but does not seem to go beyond loose colloboration. On the other hand CRM or ERP solutions get overly complicated.

What I would love to see would be a very rigorous and basic task management application where:

1) You would edit and setup a project timeline on a page, where there would be dependencies between projects, and deadlines. A simple gannt chart really.

2) You would create documents that are “work package specifications”: Google documents that are proper specifications for a task, not like a simple notepad area to put in “Get some milk from the supermarket” style tasks. These documents would be created in ad-hoc fashion, and associated with projects. So, each project would consist of a set of work packages, and output of each project (thus all the work packages associated with it) would be an input dependency for the subsequent project.

3) Work package specifications are submitted to users (i.e. employees) by the Project owner.

4) Work package status is monitored. (E.g. state = complete, incomplete, waiting for input, cancelled)

5) Project status is monitored.(state = complete, incomplete …)

Archiving:

6) Finished work packages and projects are archived. Results are used for employee performance evaluation. If you read the book “Winning” by Jack Welch, you would see how important this step is. How well did the employees perform on the given work packages and projects? How much did they learn and experience? A point-based evaluation using past project data.

I would need precisely that, no less, no more. The key point here is simplicity. Unfortunately nobody seems to do this without filling in the scene with hard-to-use, bloated features and colorful charts. Google Apps currently only satisfies Step 2 and 3, i.e. collaboration is loose, not organised within projects or a work flow. I believe spreadsheets are not the best interface for this. I would like to see these features so much that I took the time to write this.

Thanks, Bahadir