Onboarding the team

Here is our recommendation on onboarding your team on SmartTask

Using SmartTask is easy but getting your team up and running takes careful planning, patience and persistence.

We have analysed most of successful teams on SmartTask and here are our recommendation for a successful implementation:

1. Answer 'Why SmartTask'

Adopting a change is tough and changing our team’s daily habit is no cake walk. Before you invite your team have an answer for “Why SmartTask?” which would motivate your teammates. Note down a few pain points and how the same are solved with SmartTask. For example:

Pain point	Example
Coordination is difficult	We spend almost 60% of our time in coordination (phone calls, emails & in-person meetings)
Responsibilities are unclear	Missed deadlines, who's doing what and by when
Project management is difficult	Which tasks are remaining? Who needs help? What's missing?
Processes are inconsistent	We spend a lot of time for setting up repetitive projects, we always start from scratch.
Overload	We remember each and every small stuff creating stress for ourselves

2. Design your implementation plan

Once we have established the purpose of using SmartTask. We need an implementation plan to adopt SmartTask. Set expectations and implementation milestones to gauge if implementation is on track.

What to include in the implementation plan

Though implementation plan may differ from organization to organization most may include the following points:

• Picking the first process you would like to accomplish with SmartTask.

• Identifying key teammates you trust and whose influence would help promote and reinforce SmartTask usage.

• Inviting teammates. We recommend our email template to send out invitations.

• Have a getting started meeting.

• Establish a milestone like “move process to SmartTask in 4 weeks”.

• Give a few key tasks to start with.

3. Picking the first process

Here are few characteristics of an ideal first process to start with:

• Work in the project is lot of to and fro between the teammates

• It’s simple and has clear goals.

• Every team member has a part to play.

• Is difficult to execute and current processes aren’t working.

Create a project, invite teammates and ask them not to be afraid of making a mistake or un-intended changes as it’s easy to undo in SmartTask. Try out different features and ideas to get familiar with functionalities. (Request the team to download SmartTask mobile app for immediate notifications on updates) Once the invited team is doing well, invite rest of the team and ask the current team to help out new members.

4. Setting and enforcing conventions

Once you start using SmartTask, figure out what works best and what steps should be taken at what time. For example a project manager may know how to duplicate a project template but may not know at what stage a new project should be created.

Our recommendations:

• Create a shared project where people can discuss ideas and share feedback on conventions.

• Avoid phone-calls, email threads, in-person meetings instead prefer adding a task or discussing over project chat.

• Establish what an ideal task is.

• Incentivize best performer and utilizing SmartTask in the best way possible.

• Have someone friendly to enforce right way of using SmartTask.

• Have weekly meetings for addressing problems faced and improve upon the conventions.

5. Expand and improve the implementation

Once things are moving along, study what can be improved, whether a process can be improved further, did we meet our expectations and if timeline was achieved. On successful process implementation, expand and include more processes and workflows that haven’t yet be included. Getting your team on board with SmartTask isn’t always quick and easy, but once you do, collaboration and productivity will become much easier than ever before.