Aitrack web based task management

Human resources has plenty of challenges.  We are the line where business meets personal.  While many important functions flow through the human resources departments we are like a consultant, lots of influence but little mandate.

One of the primary frustrations is that the we are responsible for numerous areas of compliance and these require interacting with and receiving paperwork from nearly everyone in the organization.  The problem is that compliance while required is rarely the top priority of employees.  As a human resource executive my staff spends nearly fifty percent of there time following up to get documents from staff and making sure that they are completed correctly.

In my organization his means following up on several thousands people in a distributed environment.
We have tried numerous solution to simplify this but the fact remains without a system of constant reminders or being able to provide managers a clear concise list of who needs to get us what this just generally does not happen.

We recently kind of stumbled into a nice way of managing this.  While not solving all our problems we have reduced the amount of follow up to less than fifteen percent of my staffs time.  That is quite a nice change.  We took an existing applications called Aitrack.  Aitrack web based task management provides anyone in the organization to assign tasks to anyone else.  It then provides notification to the person who has the task due.  The user can not get rid of the task until it is approved by the person who issued it.  Unlike emails which simply got buried and forgotten. Aitasks require the agreement of our staff. 

We now send out a document as an Aitask, attach the required form to it and set the date it has to be back.  The system takes care of enforcement.  In the instance where staff fails to return the requested work on time it is obvious and easy to provide management a tracking of who has not complied and what the history is.

After the first two or three rounds of this our staff found it much simpler just to get the document back.  Aitrack literally changed the behavior of our staff.  It also gave the ability for feedback between the human resources department and the users to answer questions or to control paper flow when a user made a small error.  It reduced the time to resolve an issue from days and weeks to hours.

I think the end result for me that made the whole thing worth while is that the tool was so effective it nearly made itself obsolete. 
Not that you could tear my aitrack page from my cold dead hands but I know it has made my department and our executive management very happy and saved us millions in potential liability by bringing us into compliance in numerous key areas.

Janet Wilkerson
VP Human Resources
TWG

Human Resources, distributed environment, aitask, compliance, liability, aitrack web based task management

Employee turnover is a double edged sword.  In one instance I have good people who I have trained and worked into my process who leave, either through internal promotion or for new oppurtunities at another company.  In other instances I have people who are not performing but the pain of transitioning their responsibilities would be such as hassle I end up keeping them despite the lack of productivity.

My big issues is simply knowing what a person is working on at a given time.  To many times I have found myself digging through an ex-employee corporate email trying to figure out who they owe what to and where a project is.  There is a huge cost as many of these tasks simply never get done.  Customers are not followed up on, business opportunity that we invested months and thousands of dollar just disappear because no one knows exactly what was being done and other staff is busy with their own work.

Using Aitrack web based task management has simplified this problem tremendously.  While a task management system can never replace the skills of a dedicated staff member it can provide an organized transition.  Aitrack has a role called an executive.  This role can be given to a manager and allows them to look over the tasks that staff members owe to other people and people owe to them.

It also gives detailed statistics on how many task are outstanding, how many are complete and if they where completed on-time.  I use it reguarly to make sure that we have an equitable distribution of work in the organizaton.  This feature alone makes the product worth while for me but its not the part that makes it so useful for transition.

What really makes it helpful is that it allows the exectuive to reassign the tasks.  So if a person leaves you can see exactly what they where working on, complete with all of the task history, the notes and files. You can hand the tasks to the next person or distribute them among existing staff members.  Tasks that where assigned to the individual who is leaving can be returned to the person who assigned them so that they can evaluate the logical next step based on the history of actions.

In a perfect world I would have all hard working people who stuck around and responsibly transitioned their assignments, but until that day comes Aitrack takes a lot of the pain out of emplyee turnover and allows me to make better business and staffing decisions by giving me the resources and the tools to re-distribute the workload.

Avi Nelson
Manager Production
Greenwood Inc