Learning Launch

Challenge

I am currently leading a team of DWH Business Analysts where we have tasks assigned to us from  Demand and Delivery Solutions team and then we assign other tasks to other DWH teams after we finish  our scope.

My Current challenge is that we are not able to track the tasks assigned to us along with the time taken  to finish them as well as the tasks we assign to other teams due to the lack of proper tracking system  among different teams during the life cycle of the same project.

The system or way of tracking we should decide on can be used among all stakeholders working on the  same project

Selection

The Scope is to find a suitable way or system to track the tasks assigned to us and the tasks we assign to  others.

We decided to try the learning launch tool to experiment different tools suggested as follows:

Excel sheet tracking, online website to track our tasks, Modify in house project tracking system to assign  tasks on different team members

We needed to test the different suggested tools to check which one would get us to our target.

Application

Our first learning launch was to ask each member of our team to maintain an excel sheet with all tasks  assigned to them and another sheet for tasks they assign to others.

We tried to maintain the sheet and keep it accurate as much as we can taking into consideration that we  are already doing the same using internal emails.

We tried the above approach for a month but unfortunately depending on different individuals to  maintain the same sheet and doing the same task twice lead to that people either forgot to update the  sheet or dropped doing the task as they have already used the mail to do it

Insight

We tried to depend on the excel sheet for accurate documentation and we expected we would get  accurate results but we found out that the excel sheet maintenance was hard for people as they are  required to do the same task twice; once by mail and once on the sheet and the mail gained them  results quickly so they skipped the excel sheet update.

Approach

Based on the fact of doing the task twice is hard for people; we reviewed this approach and decided to  try the other option of using a system for tracking tasks.

The System life cycle shall start from the team that assigns the tasks to us; where the task shall be  assigned to our team on the system and at the same time it shall send an email notification with the  assignment.

The same thing shall be applied by our team when assigning tasks to other DWH teams.

That way we shall avoid the double effort of doing the same task twice and the system shall be  responsible for providing accurate list of different tasks.

