KISS or Keep It Simple Stupid is an acronym that is lost on most task and project management solutions. They are crammed with features without any practical applications for businesses, teams and organizations that use them.
This week, we will review Producteev – a task management solution. Producteev cuts right through the chase and focuses on getting things done.
In this Producteev review, we will look at its features, interface, and see how it can be of use to you and your team.
About Producteev
Bruno Correia, product manager at Jive, says two factors differentiate Producteev from its competitors: multi-platform availability and simplicity. This means that Producteev is available across multiple platforms including as a Webapp, an iOS app, a Mac OS X app, and an Android app. All are extremely simple and easy-to-use. “The whole idea behind Producteev is to focus on one point: to help teams to get things done faster,” he says.
In an interesting twist to the traditional software development process (and I am including the Waterfall and Agile models here) where support tickets and bugs are treated as enhancements or feature requests, Correia says the Producteev team spends most of its time restraining themselves from adding new features.
“We do this to keep time to ameliorate the current ones and tweak the user interface,” he says. In addition, they consider requests for technical manuals a failure on their part. “If we’re asked “How can I…? We consider that that there is something to rebuild” he says. In sum, he says Producteev has been designed with simplicity in mind and should be accessible to any worker in the world. While he cannot share the product roadmap with us, Correia does let us in on a little secret: Producteev will have its own native iPad app and will be fully integrated in and with Jive, the company’s flagship solution.
Working With Producteev
As I mentioned earlier, Producteev is relatively simple to use. It uses the concept of “networks”. Each network consists of projects, labels, users, and tasks. Thus, you can have a single or multiple projects relating to a division or department within your business or organization in the solution.
Because Producteev is a task management solution, it is designed to help you complete tasks. As such, the interface is pretty simple and has the necessary elements to help you accomplish the necessary actions. In addition, the interface has adopted the social stream paradigm. Thus, entering and assigning a task is as simple as entering text into a box and using an icon to assign it to someone or some people and hitting enter. To encourage collaboration Producteev also allow you to comment on any task and to attach document and files from your Hard Drive or from Dropbox.
Each project has specific privacy settings, which helps you share with your whole network, or within a specific team. Each task also has several labels that can be used to group similar tasks together. Similarly, you can also “follow” tasks to track their completion. For example, you can follow tasks that might be related to your team’s task and coordinate their completion with that of your team and receive a notification (by email or on your mobile) when something related to this task is happening. To ensure simple and effective task management, you can use sidebar filters to sort tasks by projects, people, and labels. Currently, the solution integrates with Jive’s flagship social business software. However, Correia has promised further integration in the future.
Pros and Cons
I have just one word to describe Producteev: simplicity. The solution is simple and easy-to-use. And that is its greatest asset. Task management software can become unnecessarily complicated due to multiple features and addons that may not be required by users. However, Producteev keeps things simple and helps users focus on tasks using an innovative social paradigm. Because it integrates with Jive’s flagship social business software, the solution is extensible as well.
However, I do think that including analytics might improve the solution’s utility. For example, analytics and reports will help managers better track their reports’ productivity and task completion rates. In addition, it can also provide an invaluable big picture for the entire project and, in some cases, the entire organization.
Pricing
In a riff off the popular social networking website Facebook, Producteev proudly advertises that it is free and will always be. This is good news for teams and organizations strapped for cash and resources. They can use the solution to manage small tasks as well as interesting side projects to begin with. Of course, as comfort levels increase, they can ramp up their usage of the solution.
Is It For You?
Most definitely. It is free and useful. What more do you want?
Ratings: ease of use 5/5, features 5/5, value 5/5 and ease of deployment 4/5