TM.AN: COMMANDING THE POWER OF COLLABORATIVE

TASK MANAGEMENT

Bader Maktari, Naoufel Werghi, Zoheir Ezziane

ollege of Information Technology, Dubai University College , Dubai, U.A.E.

eywords: Information systems, Task management, Collaborative support technologies

Abstract: The fundamental driving force behind any business, no matter of its size is the generation of tasks. The

logical grouping of these tasks into business processes has cause the phenomenal development of software

packages to meet the need of natural internal business evolution, which is evident by the mass number of

business applications available on the market today. However this paper will try to single out a specific area

that has not received as great amount of application development attention, due to its in-between nature. The

TM.AN (Task Management and Administrative Notification) application focuses on this unlit area by

developing/outlining the needed features to encourage a more task oriented culture, thereby exploiting its

applied benefits. This paper, describes the concepts that inspired the development of TM.AN such as the

lack of information/progress sharing between employees and the design principles for instance the

development of a structure to capture performance information from employee, task and customer entities.

1 INTRODUCTION

Often the greatest challenges are found in the most

smallest and ordinary of things as can be seen from

cases like the splitting of an atom. This false initial

presentation is not confined to a single area of

science or business and thus can be seen in many

other situations in life. Therefore the process of

breaking down the simple activity of task creation,

assignment and progress exchange into a structured

system that can be utilized along with other

resources such as customer information, is an

equally challenging endeavor to pursue, as long as it

possesses the capability of generating a viable and

effective management output. However certain valid

justifications are necessary to strengthen the case for

focusing development efforts that will be presented

herein.

1.1 The Problem of Task Generation

Today most establishments have a growing customer

base that on a daily basis calls for tasks to be

assigned to team leaders and team members sparked

off either by internal or external customers, thus in

an intensive business arena these tasks assigned

amount to a staggering number. Often the content is

far too lengthy or unclear where the requested task

can be easily classified by a standard category.

These task categories are common and are usually a

daily business activity e.g. customer follow-up,

where the goal can be summarized into a few direct

power sentences i.e. a task statement.

If tasks are assigned verbally without directly

following it up with documentation procedures, this

Figure 1:

Niche Location

268

Ezziane Z., Werghi N. and Maktari B. (2004).

TM.AN: COMMANDING THE POWER OF COLLABORATIVE TASK MANAGEMENT.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on E-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 268-274

DOI: 10.5220/0001380502680274

 SciTePress

can intern lead to the task being forgotten or

backlogged when remembered. In addition when

weekly and monthlymeetings occur, whose main

purpose is to determine the progress of each task

assigned, a common occurrence is that a team

member notes down their tasks either in a calendar

book, notepad or electronic application and thereby

prioritizes their tasks accordingly. Succeeding this

event is a separation of work focus by team

members i.e. each member will go off to tackle a

certain issue divided and agreed upon. This

consequently causes a deficiency in structured

progress information exchange as no one team

member will be fully aware to the extent of the

other’s progress including the manager, unless a

manual request for an update transpires or an

information system is available that is capable of

tracking the progress. This is an issue because the

process of manually requesting an update is a time

consuming checkup activity that engulfs the time

and effort of two individuals rather than one. Hence

the problem lies here in the ineffective interchange

of information among team members. There is no fix

set of protocols to convey a task request, nor is there

any structured mechanism in which tracking of tasks

can take place. To add to the complexity of things,

the nature of an email oriented culture has further

extended the difficulty in the management of tasks

as the distinction between direct task requests,

notification of events, inquiries, memos, etc. merge

into a single routine of divide and conquer via

manually filtering/sorting email messages. Note that

the above observations are taken from the

environment analysis of the FedEx, but are logically

applicable to many other companies. Summing it up

best is Figure 1, where it highlights the area that

requires unification, namely the integration of PMS

(Personal Management Software) of the various

employees into a single structured unit. Drawing the

attention to project management software one of the

most heavily utilized functions is to define

milestones (high level tasks) that can be used as a

master template for the creation of sub tasks. By

basing sub tasks on a master template it can be

directly linked to it and further assist high level

management to view and track the progress of

reaching the high level goals via examining the

micro events (tasks) occurring to make this

milestone possible. What is important to remember

is that every employee must be freely able to create

as many tasks as they deem necessary to achieve

their goal, thus enabling flexibility and the

conception of duty delegation. In addition, there

should be a mechanism for management to

dynamically set the amount (percentage) that one

employee is contributing to the milestone. Of course

the unified system must be able to utilize some if not

all of the collaboration tools available to the

company’s disposal. An interesting point to note

about figure 1 is that the various software e.g. PMS

information stored are cloaked from the internal

human resources that suggests that information is

not necessarily shared, but rather exported when

required. Lastly call center software packages

nowadays act as the first point of communication

between the customer and the company, offering the

unification of all nodes of interaction such as phone,

email, web chat, etc. which along with customer data

and history can greatly assist the service level

produced. Regardless of this assistance the backend

aftermath of the customer interaction or service

request is not structured and this very much

highlights the issue that TM.AN is aiming to bolster.

Therefore one can sum up figure 1 by stating that

front end interactions with customers, which

typically is brief can be unified fairly easily,

however the back end request for resolution remains

dispersed and uni-encapsulated i.e. each employee

masks their activities from one another, due in part

to the natural way of human interaction and work

focus.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

Under this section two main goals are put forth,

firstly to clearly classify the product category to

which TM.AN belongs to, thereby enabling all

relevant alternative solutions to be extracted and

secondly to evaluate the effectiveness of task data as

a solid measurement for employee performance.

2.1 Product Category Fitting (PCF)

The first question that one should ask about an

application is the category to which it resides under.

To answer this, lets examine the most fundamental

element of TM.AN, that is a task. A task can be

simply a self-related event which is part of one’s

personal or professional daily life, where the task

can be either self generated or created by another

person. Furthermore tasks can be assigned to more

than one person, depending on the complexity and

the time constraints applied. Thus if the area for

Figure 2: Defining a Perform Scale for Tasks

TM.AN: COMMANDING THE POWER OF COLLABORATIVE TASK MANAGEMENT

269

tasks that are self generated and for a personal use

are examined (personal event managing software),

found will be thousands of applications that offers

this service effectively, along with a wide range of

rich features. However the application is not aimed

at self generated and personal tasks. The next type of

tasks is those generated from a single or small group

of sources (project manager/team) and assigned to

lower levels of employees for execution. Here again

one will find a vast number of project management

software applications that cover a vast range of

complex concepts. Then it is obvious that the subject

application is aimed for professional use, where

tasks are created and assigned by different

individuals (not self generated) meaning that it is a

collaboration tool. An immediate argument that

occurs is that email is a collaboration tool which

satisfies any task type and is immensely successful.

However if one is categorical, email is a generic

collaboration tool that is an instant messaging and

document carrying software, which suffers from a

few flaws. The first and most common flaw is

overflow of input, in that an employee of an email

oriented company is nowadays bombarded with

sometimes hundreds of email messages per day,

which may have nothing to do with any task at all.

Second, emails have a send and forget policy where

once the email is sent the tracking of it is thereby

eliminated, thus an email system totally lacks

structure in the area of progress tracking. Lastly

email systems have no inbuilt mechanism to truly

distinguish emails apart, so that it can represent them

in a categorized form. This being the case, email is

not a powerful collaboration tool, but a potent

communication relaying tool.

Back to the topic at hand the categorization of the

application. Vessey and Sravanapudi (Vessey I. et

al., 1995) in analyzing CASE tools as a collaborative

technology identified three collaborative supporting

architectures taskware, teamware and groupware.

Where the nature of taskware outlines a standalone

task without the possibility of sharing it with others

(self generated and contained). Teamware is the

sharing of work resources or products and

groupware being an act of expression through

communication with others about the work

undertaken. At first glance one might jump ahead

and select the teamware category, but sharing a

working resource for example design

focuses on teamware diagrams such as DFDs (Data

Flow Diagrams) or ERDs (Entity Relationship

Diagrams) and facilitates a venue to communicate

about design changes and decisions. Therefore the

groupware category lends itself as the most

suitable classification of the subject application.

An interesting point brought about by Henderson

and Cooprider (Vessey I. et al., 1995) is that tasks

should have an anonymous feedback rating system

to comment on the efficiency of work performed i.e.

the task’s performance. Additionally noted as

favorable essentials contained in a groupware based

application, are the inclusion of direct email

messaging in case of immediate notification

requirements and calendar management. That should

comprise of both individual calendar management

functions as well as the sharing of fellow co-

worker’s events i.e. events can be posted into

authorized calendar books of others. As for the email

notification facility, it is already present in the

application, thus providing a feedback option in

terms of rating a task, is a simple and quickly

achievable feature.

2.2 Task as a Performance

Measurement

The performance efficiency of an employee will be

judged based upon the information extrapolated

from task data, which emphasizes on the importance

of the task entity being a strong indication of

performance. Then it is only logical to briefly

investigate if the task and related information stored

encompasses enough data to be exploited as a solid

measurement of an employee’s performance or is the

task measurement only a partial quantifier that

requires readouts from other assessments to achieve

a comprehensive overall employee appraisal.

Hannesson (Harkins S.S. et al., 2001) recommended

that a performance appraisal covers the activities

which an employee performs as part of their daily

routine and more importantly forms a clear

definition for each type of task executed, as to what

is meant by a good job. Thus to define how well a

job is performed a scale should be composed that

rates the performance, in which every value on that

scale has a simple and clear meaning to it.

Hannesson (Harkins S.S. et al., 2001) gave a job

example that entails basic equipment maintenance

and applied a scale of one to three (poor, average

and outstanding performance respectively) and

Figure 3: Required Elements for Task Performance

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defined the scale illustrated in figure 2. Further more

Hannesson also provided a sample monthly job

review sheet that composed of columns: task of job,

when it is to be completed, task done and comments.

These

columns used in the review sheet have a

resemblance to the data fields

stored in the database of

TM.AN. On the other hand Kirksey’s (Kirksey J. et

al., 1994) article begs to differ, stating that in order

for an appraisal to be truly valid a so called 360°

perspective is needed, in which it has a pool of

‘feedback from both internal and external customers

to receive a broader, more accurate perspective on

employees’. The main difference between the 360°

appraisal and the more traditional type is a

dictatorship style, where the process is manned by a

single person (the supervisor) that acts as the judge,

jury and executioner. However the 360° appraisal

casts a full jury, which can compose of all entities

that the employee interacts with such as external

customers and internal customers (top management,

peers, departments, etc.). Therefore this achieves a

more dynamic and fair appraisal as the sources of

feedback are diverse, covering all angles and

perspectives, thus leaving no position for an

employee to hide and hence rendering it a more

valid rating system. The important issues to note

about this type of appraisal is that it offers peer

rather than manager feedback (stronger), encourages

more self-development, assists in correlating ones

own perceptions of performance with the actual and

decentralizes an employee’s focus on satisfying the

manager alone, thereby refocusing it on the

internal/external customers that now will contribute

to their performance evaluation. It is clear that a

task can act as a standalone performance measure in

a certain frame of mind. However the contradicting

arguments expressed that this type of task based

single evaluator assessment, is ineffective at gaining

a factual rating of an employee’s performance.

Regardless, the application stores enough data about

a task to satisfy Hannesson’s recommendation for

evaluation, but lacks one key element that is the

weighting of a selected task. Thus one could put in

place a weighting to each main category listed in the

DB (Database), in which a three point scaling

system can be used as mentioned by Hannesson, but

stored will be the definitions defined on the scale.

This then could take the shape of the supervisor

editing these main categories and assigning the

appropriate values to it. Therefore when a rating is

required these definitions can be extracted and

formulated into a visual three point grading bar,

which is exemplified by the upper portion of figure

3. With regards to Kirksey’s (Kirksey J. et al., 1994)

point of offering a broader range of feedback inputs,

if we compare it to Vessey and Sravanapudi’s

(Vessey I. et al., 1995) comment on offering a

feedback rating implementation, essentially the two

are referring to the same issue of incorporating a

feedback mechanism into a groupware application.

The only difference is that Kirksey suggested the

sources of feedback, internal and external customers.

Having said that, this then highlights the importance

of a feedback mechanism as being a key contributor

to a groupware application’s effectiveness and

success. So if we briefly review TM.AN’s core

features for the previous key element, it offers the

ability to assign tasks that come from “internal

customers” and at the same time the tasks created

are directly related to “external customers”, but

missing from it is the feedback mechanism, however

the structure of the mechanism i.e. the data and

logical relationships are already in place within the

system. Therefore all that is required is an additional

process for feedback creation, submitting and

storing, thereby achieving the necessary extended

data to create and map out a so called 360° appraisal,

as is partially illustrated by the lower portion of

figure 3. One could envision that the external

customer’s feedback takes the shape of offering

monthly the opportunity to rate the performance of

services received. In which the customer could have

an interface that displays all of the tasks related to

the organization and therewith submits their

feedback on the desired tasks. The points mentioned

previously have not as of yet been incorporated into

the application, however the current structure of the

application does not prevent these new features

highlighted from being easily molded in. Neither

will its induction cause the existing system

composition to be modified in a reconstruction

sense, but instead in more additional building block

fashion.

3 DRIVING MOTIVATIONS FOR

CREATION

The FedEx who TM.AN was intended for supplies

software solutions to their existing and new

customers. In which the process of after sales service

support, lacks true documentation and customer

interaction visibility and thus the construction of

TM.AN was deemed necessary to tackle four key

areas in this regard:

1) Interaction Transparency 2) Performance

Monitoring 3) Progress & Info Exchange 4)

Activity Documentation. Where interaction

transparency is the ability of any of the concerned

parties being able to view and log the various task

interactions occurring between a single employee

and the customer, even at the most simplest level.

One of the key advantages of adopting an interaction

TM.AN: COMMANDING THE POWER OF COLLABORATIVE TASK MANAGEMENT

271

transparency policy is that each employee is

consciously aware as their manager can be, of the

activity’s performance with respect to handling the

designated duties and the effective documentation of

them. Secondly, by putting forth an interaction

transparency policy, employees are forcefully

encouraged to collaborate, as by doing so they are

effectively placing a record of occurred

communications that can be used as proof of

transpired events and also permits one to generate

fairly automatically a daily report for activities

performed. However the strongest advantage is that

Indirect Customer Interactions (ICI) taking place are

not shielded from other involved employees. As if

this occurs, the customer may feel a lack of internal

communication within the company as each person

has no idea of his/her previous interaction. Even

employees themselves may duplicate work or extend

work effort as their lacks task transparency and

information of ICIs.

To give a better understanding of the concept of

interaction transparency or in the case of figure 4 the

lack of it, depicted are some of the pressing issues

that can arise. To begin with figure 4 illustrates that

each employee uni-encapsulates five pieces of

information, most of which are kept protected by the

individual. One of the points which figure 4 attempts

to exemplify is that much of what an individual

knows and does (some of which is processing of

tasks) is masked from other key individuals, whose

involvement maybe instrumental in the success of

their own activities. This in a personal and private

sense is understandable and often desired, however

it is not an attractive quality when the information

stored by the employee can be better utilized when

shared. Furthermore, even when information is

shared by a person, it is done so with control and

limitations being impose over the extracted content.

Thus any additional information needed is still

housed under the individual’s knowledge pool and to

access it direct contact is necessary, which may span

over several communication instances. This

inevitably leads to a single point of knowledge

failure, if that person becomes unavailable. Moving

on, if one draws attention to the lower portion of

figure 4, put forth is the obvious notion that

customers and co-workers can directly modify the

required tasks that an employee has to perform,

given that a task authorization type relationship has

been formed. In which the modification process

occurs via a communication tool such as fax, phone

and email or via face-to-face contact. An important

point to note about figure 4 is that every interaction

that takes place whether it maybe from a co-worker

or customer to one employee is shielded information

i.e. the other concerned parties may not know about

the interaction’s occurrence as it passes through a

single person and thus the responsibility for the

escalation and conveying of that task is solely reliant

on one person. Finally, if one is to permit interaction

transparency the needed scenario is simply to move

the information elements outside the limited scope

of an individual and place it into the public arena,

whilst maintaining the same logical security that

would be applied by that individual. Tools like

Knowledge Based System (KBS) can move what has

been learnt to the outside arena as can tools in

regards to document sharing, however most tools

with a task organization role tend to keep what a

person is doing in the same encapsulated state, only

improving and not moving the process (one of the

goals of TM.AN) outside a single knowledge pool.

Lastly as information aging occurs, it only seems

logical to exploit it at its early stages as one would

do a disease and if done so one can easily merge

software tools from each of the information elements

into a single unified system.

The following area of progress and info exchange

examines tasks that involve at least one target person

and a task owner, in which required is an effective

exchange of collaboration information and the

event’s progress as it matures to completion. The

key point to note is that exchanges maybe

synchronous or asynchronous and thus it is

important for asynchronous exchanges to be stored

in a centralized location that is universally

accessible. As it will allow the parties involved to

check on the progress of the task, even if the person

needed is unavailable, however even when the

exchanges are synchronous miscommunications or

forgetfulness can lead to issues. Hence in either case

exchanges need to be logged centrally to maintain

clarity of the progress made. Performance

monitoring is the exploitation of the data stored

about tasks in order to extract performance based

information. If one cross references this with data of

Figure 4: Lack of Interaction Transparency

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employees and customers, further interesting

inferences can be extracted from this connection.

Such examples include viewing a customer

utilization of the workforce, viewing the team’s

effort and outcomes, comparing employee

compatibility with one another, etc. From a

manager’s perspective by having an effective

performance monitoring system in place, achievable

is a current mapping out of interactions taking place,

an improved sensitivity to trends among the different

entities in the organization and accountability for

activities performed or not. Activity documentation

refers simply to the structure documentation of all

interactions especially of a customer type that has

two phases activity instantiation and wrap-up duties

i.e. fifty percent or more of the required activity

actions are performed during the first phase and the

rest of the duties are performed afterwards in an

unknown timeframe. Activity documentation is

needed in order for interaction transparency,

performance monitoring and progress/info exchange

to be achievable. Any interaction that can justify a

task creation should be carried out, as even a few

sentences of documentation can turn very useful

later on when unseen circumstances occur. Also by

documenting activities it provides an instant action

statement that can assist an employee to execute

routinely requested reports, gauge performance and

even formulate a calendar outline. It is interesting to

note the mentioned information that one can extract

from so called simple task data, which is clearly

quiet useful on many fronts. This indicates that the

documentation of activities performed in relation to

customer and employee data has a strong base for

data mining. Having said that one can infer that an

application which documents and assists in the

carrying through of customer requests is a highly

desirable notion, because thousands of businesses

have customers to support and this support intern

generates internally numerous forms of

informal/formal task assignment that merges into

one solid result, a complete customer resolution.

However in most cases this internal resolution is

either unstructured or lacks efficiency in one of the

mentioned areas. Hence if one can develop an open

and modular system that can handle a generic task

assignment features, integrate it with customer data

and meet the mentioned items, then a definite and

large market is open for the taking.

4 CONCLUSION

One might get the impression from reading the

previous passages that TM.AN is an application of

some great nature, but the fact of the matter it is not,

as its peak of maturity has not even been touched.

Potentially the most interesting thing discovered was

that most developers have skipped this issue of

managing and sharing task data by either creating

applications that are meant for high level project

management environments or by developing fine

task organizational tools. One of the most important

notions presented was expressed by figure four as it

attempted to abstract the idea that in order to achieve

sharing of what someone knows and has learnt, it

can be done so via exploiting the point of origin (the

assignment of tasks), thereby enabling one to access

the above information elements, allowing the

unification/integration of these elements by an

intelligent application. Since it has been established

that the process of task handling is important

(processing) and the management deliverables are

useful (output), no mention has been made to the

inputting process for tasks, which should logically

also hold a potential benefit. The communication

tool used to relay task data have a high beneficial

value, but is outside the scope of this paper.

However it is useful to touch on it lightly, to further

strengthen the importance of task management.

Bellotti et al. (Bellotti V. et al., 2003) in their

research confirmed that email and task management

are frequently in separable, sometimes being

indistinguishable and always a priceless resource,

which needs a strong set of streamlining

measurements to be applied to the email

environment. The main point suggested by Bellotti

et al. is that email is the primary communication tool

used today in most businesses as the prime input

source to a task management system, due to its

widespread and accessible nature. Hence this all

points to developing a task management system that

stores beneficial and utilizable data, whose chief

concern is a strong development, centered on task,

customer and employee data. Where the

development process should maintain three key

points, increasing management’s knowledge of

interactions occurring through performance

information, facilitate a task transparency

environment and streamline the inputting process, by

focusing on the available communication tools,

giving priority to email.

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