Our teleworking experience shows the Task management is the most critical efficiency issue is in the digital collaboration space (but also in face-to-face working). Why?

1. Completion of a task is a multiphase collaboration process. But usually participants (task requester and task provider(s) can imagine differently this process if this is not defined in advance.
2. Task assignments are defined vaguely and very often only discussed verbally.
3. The result of the task is not clearly defined (only what to do).
4. Efforts (time spent and other resources) are not planned ahead and reported after completion only.
5. Provider initiatively starts a task based on some preliminary discussion without an agreed assignment.

The bottom line: Losing time and resources spent of participants (cost) by clarification their expectations on the subject and task completion criteria during the process.

In our lecture, we provide an approach that significantly minimizes these efficiency losses.

Step 1: Define the task management process applicable to each teleworker (mainly for the new ones) in your company collaboration space. Here is an example:

There are 3 important milestones of the task process: Specification, Assignment acceptance, and Task results acceptance. For clarification of task status at these milestones online collaboration services can be deployed (chat, web-meeting optionally recorded)

Step 2: Define clearly the assignment. Mainly the result and the digital location where you can review and accept it. Here is a template

Step 3: In case of group collaboration in several tasks please use task dashboard with access to all group members. This is a good reminder to everybody what was agreed to deliver, by whom, and when. An example:

Group the tasks according to company subject groups. Consult regularly the task progress with the providers and make records.