Over the past 3 years, the Digital team at Access has grown dramatically in number and in work load. With the steep increase in number and complexity of projects, our Monday morning work-in-progress notes were becoming unworkable. Within hours the sheets were out of date and scribbled on, things were getting forgotten about and there was far too much pinging of emails back and forth. It was becoming evident that we needed a better way of managing tasks within the department.
What do we really want?
Having given it some thought, what we really wanted was:
- accurate and reactive to updates through the day
- central and web-based – save paper, remote access, same list for everyone
- very easy to use for all members of the business
- simple permissions to allow people to jump in on jobs and make updates
- email notifications when tasks are updated
- suitable for a range of work types like bugs reports, mini development tasks and large web projects
- we may also like to roll it out to different areas of the business like the Design department
- follow a simple logic of clients have projects, projects have tasks
What’s out there already?
We considered all kinds of existing systems like Basecamp, Lighthouse and activeCollab, amongst others. Our main complaint was that most of the systems were too complex and it too time consuming to create jobs on the system; we desperately wanted to make it quick and easy for everyone, otherwise people wouldn’t use it!
Do it with Drupal?
As a very Drupal-focused agency, we started to look at how we could do this with Drupal; the thinking being that we have the know-how to customise a Drupal solution. So we looked at Open Atrium and a whole bunch of modules you can just download and add to Drupal itself (comparison here). Again, we found these just too complicated or geared too much towards IT or Software technical support tickets. But one module stood at as being very close to what we needed – Case Tracker.
Case Tracker was good (read ’simple’) but needed some tweaking
In Case Tracker, we had found a very good starting point. It is small collection of Drupal 6.0 modules that handles the Project-Task relationship, permissions, updates comments and email notifications. All we needed to do was tweak the views, add in clients via taxonomy, build a theme and make the log-in system more pleasant. The final product is actually very usable!
Is it working in the business?
We gradually phased in what we refer to as ‘Access Task Manager’ to the business over a few weeks. It’s been up and running for two months and so far the feedback has been very positive. Users have found it very intuitive, very little training has been required. All the ‘can you just do this’ emails disappeared overnight and turned in to well-formatted requests on Task Manager. Follow-up comments and updates to the task are centrally stored – very handy when a key member of the team is out of the office.
Download Task Manager for yourself
We love ‘Task Manager’ so much that we have added the code for you to download here on our blog – Task Manager – Drupal 6 and Case Tracker made better
