DeskAway Shows The Way In Project Management

One of the great things about the Internet is the way that it enables collaborative working and nowhere is this best seen that with online project management packages. One of the neatest I have seen recently is DeskAway which combines an easy to use interface with some powerful back end functions.

Setting up a project and allocating responsibilities is simplicity itself. Once the project has been created you can choose the team which is going to work on the project, create a list of people and organisations which team members may wish to contact as part of the project.  Other facilities are a calendar which contains timeline information, a reports function which shows project progress in easy to read chart format and, quite brilliantly, an internal blog.

The inclusion of the blog function shows how much thought the DeskAway development team have put into this facility.  It’s all very well having tasks etc allocated and being able to check progress but even in remote, collaborative working the human element is important, a simple but vital tool to keep team members communicating with each other.

Again with simplicity in mind when you first sign up to DeskAway and start to explore the various modules you are provided with a video tutorial which demonstrates the full functionality of the system. Again, not rocket science  but too many develops think that users will fall over functions which are obvious to those who created the package but not necessarily to new users.

One of the things I think is missing is that in the team records there is nowhere to record the skills of participants.  Having  a record of the strong points of team members which could be useful in allocating who does what. This facility is incorporated into Onyaka (reviewed here) and while the team leader may know the strengths and weaknesses of team members, if someone is tasked with creating a new project module the assorted skills of the team may not be obvious.  Team member profiles, however, do contain a progress chart marking milestones, tasks, issues and overall timeline progress – a useful tool to shame the slackers!

When the team leader allocates a task the owner of that job is emailed with a notification together with a hyperlink to the project’s web presence.  If you are on a paid for package you can also use DeskMail which will allow you and your team to add tasks and reply to task comments via email. If you are using email on your smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) you can easily email out tasks to your team members (just like you would normally) and still have a copy of it stored on your DeskAway account. When people reply to those tasks, new comments are added to the task and the entire communication thread can be tracked within your projects.

Pricing for DeskAway ranges from free which allows five users, three projects and 25mb of storage to the premium $99 a month options which pretty much gives companies the freedom to use as many of the services with as many people and as many projects as they like.  From the $25 a month option upwards there is SSL protection at 256bit encryption to protect transfer of information from desktop to server.

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3. 5pm Sets Benchmark For Project Management
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5. Konolive – GTD Meets Project Management