CRM

An organization may be into manufacturing, product or consultancy. All these organizations need a system to track interactions with prospects and track an inquiry through deal pipeline and generate analytics on sales.

This is where they opt for both a Project Management software as well as a CRM. Spending 2 times the cost and at the end of the day the data remains distributed among different systems.

This is where we at SmartTask decided its time to have both the CRM and Work Management in one place, keeping conversations in projects linked to the CRM data.

Switching between Kanban and List view

Say you are working on a Content Marketing workflow, it would be amazing to see the workflow in a Kanban board with tasks bifurcated by their stages in the columns. At the same time you would also like to view the tasks in a list form for focus.

This is as of now not possible with Asana. One has to decide at the creation of the project whether you want to see the tasks in a List view or Kanban view.

SmartTask provides a unique way to toggle between these two views: Sections.

Timeline

There are some significant limitations when it comes to Timeline view in Asana

View and schedule Subtasks in Timeline

Asana for some reason doesn't display subtasks in Timeline view severely limiting the end user. The ability of scheduling subtasks in the Timeline is critical to manage a project properly. Little things have a cascading effect if left un-attended, delaying the project

Auto-scheduling of Tasks

Project managers typically work on projects with multiple moving parts. Their goal is to make sure the project completes on time and within the budget. The problem with most of the work management tools out there is that they don't make it easier for the project manager to tweak the timeline in case of a delay in a particular task on which other tasks are dependent.

With Auto-scheduling feature in SmartTask is a task is delayed for some reason the Project Manager just needs to click on the "Auto-scheduling" button to schedule all the dependencies given the task delay.

Comparing project's baseline with the current one

A baseline in project management is a clearly defined starting point for your project plan. It is a fixed reference point to measure and compare your project’s progress against. This allows you to assess the performance of your project over time.

For example, let’s say your project is on target to finish in eight weeks. Is that good or bad? If your schedule baseline has a six-week completion, you can tell that there is a problem and your team may need to make adjustments to speed up your progress.

Timeline export as PDF

A lot of time a team may need to share the project plan with a 3rd party vendor or customer. That is when exporting the Timeline as a PDF or XML file is very handy. With SmartTask Timeline can be export as a PDF and be shared with third party members.

Shift project timeline by X Days

Project Templates are a key when it comes to saving time in repetitive project scenario. Duplicating a project template duplicates all the tasks and now all the project manager has to do is allocate tasks to teammates.

However, since the Project Template was created some time ago the timeline is bound to have the older dates. That is when you would need a feature to shift the project's timeline by X number of days. This feature is visibly lacking in Asana causing a lot of pain to the end-user.

With SmartTask is just a matter of setting the new "Project start date" and automatically the whole project timeline would arrange itself.

Show/Hide Activity Feed

When you have so much on your plate we don't want you fumbling to find the comment you are looking for. This is the reason why SmartTask provides for a simple way to switch off Task Activity feed and only show you relevant comments.

Advanced Analytics

You have multiple projects running in parallel. People working in tandem and yet you don't know who's performing how or how many tasks are delayed by projects or what's the summation of a Custom Number field you added to a project.

Its time we had a better way to derive insights from the data we have fed in the system. SmartTask introduces a unique way to create Custom Charts to your analytics pane. One can create Bar, Line or Pie chart similar to what we do in Excel, just select your axis values and it would plot the chart for you.

You can also add Custom Charts to saved Advanced search Reports.

Tasklist Filter

One of the features we heard a lot of users asking for was Tasklist filter. A lot of time when your tasklist grows in a project, you would find yourself scrolling and loading more and more task till the time you find the task you were searching for. This is a time consuming process and we wanted our users to have an easy way to reach to the task they were looking for.

That is where tasklist filter are invaluable, you can filter the project's / user's tasklist by Assignee, Project, Dates, Search Term, etc.

Task Reminders

Say you have an in-person meeting scheduled with a prospect for next monday at 2 pm. Given you meet so many people in a week its quite possible that this particular meeting would slip out of your mind if not logged anywhere. This is where a reminder 15 mins before would help you prepare for the upcoming meeting.

With SmartTask's reminder system you are not only notified on the desktop app but also on mobile and in email.

You also have an ability to ask SmartTask to remind you only if the task is incomplete by a particular date and time.

Productivity Scoring

SmartTask Productivity score helps you view your task management goals in a visual format. It helps visualize your progress through a colorful Chart denoting the productivity score.

Productivity score is calculated based on the following criteria:

• Are allotted tasks completed before, on time or after the deadline
• How long are the tasks overdue
• Do you put in the necessary information in comments, description for your colleagues to take an action upon.
• How collaborative are you in helping the team achieve the goals.
• Are you regular when it comes to completing tasks and communicating with team members

Depending on these characteristics, productivity score for each team member is calculated. Please note, this score is updated every 2 hours.

This score can later be utilized by the HR team as a pointer for appraisals and/or incentives.

Desktop Notifications

A lot of times we are working on something that's taking our full attention. However, we don't want to forget about the upcoming customer meeting. That is where SmartTask Reminder notifications on desktop are very critical.

SmartTask reminds about the critical customer meeting you are about to have in 30 mins so you can start preparing for it. With SmartTask's desktop notification you are updated on critical tasks you are following, comments and reminders.

Time Tracking

A lot of organizations bill their customers based on the resources they spend on the project. This is where having a Time Tracker, tracking time spent by different resources across projects is very critical for the team to make sure whether they are making profit or a loss on a particular project.

This also gives insights on how a team member is performing over time through a Timesheet repi

All users Tab

One of the glaring drawback that Asana has is there's no way to view all of the team members you have invited to your organization. You can invite team members to a Team but what about seeing all of the team members in

How about an easy way to switch between users and checking out their workload and the tasks they are working on currently?

This is something we feel strongly about. We believe there should be an easy way for the team to quickly navigate to a particular team-member to have a one to one conversation, allotting a task or to check the progress they have made on the tasks allotted to them.