Problem
Things go through your mind, requests fly into your inbox while a million other things come from different sources such as your team project management tool. Wouldn't it be great if there were a single place where you could overview all these action items? Well, you are not alone...
A centralized operating slate is every manager's dream.
When working in a team, a project management system like Asana or Trello is used by the group to collaborate, organize tasks into projects, and assign those tasks to team members. The problem with using specialized tools is that they don't give you an overview of all tasks to consider during decision-making and planning.
And our work and life are complex enough to merit more than one tool to manage them.
Scenario
You are preparing the next sprint with your team and trying to budget for time and resource availability during that period. You have to make sure that every one of your team members will be able to get the work done in the most efficient manner possible.
This process occurs in the project management tool because it contains all the tickets/action items for the sprint and some contextual information like assignee, effort, deadline, etc.
You conduct a meeting discussing the next sprint and wrap up feeling that this time the estimation the team came up with is as accurate as it can get.
However, the next day you get an email from your accounts department telling you that the grant you applied for 2 months prior came through. The financial institution now needs legal information to unlock the funds. This is going to take you at least a day of back and forth. Since your conversations with the grant committee happened over email, it wasn't transported to the project management tool and was subsequently missed during the planning meeting.
Such inefficiency is common when you don't have a centralized space to overview critical things happening in your organization on different tools.
How could you do better next time?
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