Special tasks are important tasks that must be done on time, and where normal business processes are unlikely to work. They are often high priority tasks where failure or delays have severe negative consequences.
Special tasks include; strategies, governance, compliance, initiatives, changes, reforms, operations, and projects. They are usually large tasks that involve many people in several locations, working together, to achieve a required outcome.
Some of the key challenges in managing special tasks are:
?Contributions to the special task are usually in addition to current work
?Contributions are required relatively quickly (so current work is affected)
?Cross functional/organization inputs are required (so reactions can be slow)
?Physical separation makes meeting difficult
?Roles and accountability are often unclear
?Complex evolving detail is difficult to communicate to senior managers
?Success is often determined by a small number of people with specialist skills
?There is a gap between progress being reported and actual progress
It looks like a long list, but it gets much longer when cultural issues are added. TASKey has developed distributed task management web software that makes it easy for any combination of stakeholders to work together to effectively complete special tasks. Access on mobile devices/phones makes it easy for people to use the software, anywhere, any time.
Many people unsuccessfully try to use project management techniques for special tasks. Centralizing control around a project manager doesn?t directly help the many people involved in the special task. Consequently, the designated project manager has to spend a lot of time and effort manually checking, organizing, and coordinating special task work.
Another possible solution to managing special tasks is to add more managers to manually manage sub-tasks and the things that need to be done. However, this approach is costly in terms of extra staff and wasted time, trying to contact the people doing the work, and keeping other stakeholders informed.
TASKey has found that special task management needs to be distributed amongst all stakeholders. By distributing the management in an integrated and coordinated way, all stakeholders can understand what is happening and what they need to do with who, and when. Practical distributed management requires the automation and integration of processes for planning, organizing, tracking, informing, securing, recording, and reporting. This automation makes it relatively easy to manage complex changing activities across many people in many locations.
Using distributed management techniques, and TASKey web software to complete special tasks, generates the following benefits:
?Special tasks are completed with less time, effort and stress from all stakeholders
?Less people are required to manage the work
?All stakeholders can be kept informed in real-time
?Less interruptions to on-going work
?Roles and accountability are clear
?Cross organization and links with outside contributors are explicit and automatically managed
?Decision makers receive actionable information in close to real-time
?Progress reporting is automated, so it relates closely to actual progress
?Training is minimal, because complex process are automated

Managing special tasks no longer needs to be a difficult, frustrating experience that falls to a small number of people. By using TASKey?s techniques and web software tools, all stakeholders can contribute and know what they need to know to get special tasks done.
By,
Dr Neil Miller
http://www.me2team.com