Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

-Peter F. Drucker

It doesn't matter what your role in your organization is, keeping on top of your decisions & having a deeper understanding of what is blocking the progress, goes a long way in managing your work and meeting timelines. We understand this and this is why we created two neat features to keep you on top of your decisions and blockers.  

Let's talk about the Blockers first:

Most of the project management tools are designed in a way to measure the overall project progress, burn down, velocity etc. They do not have a feature that allows you to see why a certain task is Stuck or is not moving forward. Yet, this is a pretty common sight.

Your teams could be blocked on a certain items due to unavailability of resources, other team members, dependency on third party services or updates etc. There could be many reasons why a certain task is on hold & is not moving forward.

This delays the progress of overall planned schedule.

How do you tackle this?

Well if your project management tool does not have a dedicated feature devoted to this, there are very high chances that you will discuss about it with your team. Which further requires more time to be spent in meetings & calls. This is a lot of time wasted which otherwise could have been used productively.

Decisions also have a similar story.

Although, fundamentally when you design a User Story or a new Feature, you clearly list down the acceptance criteria. But listing every possible scenario is not practical or advisable. There is a lot left for the team to decide on, as they go along. This is when they share the ideas with you & rest of the team members, some of these is what becomes the decisions for the underlaying tasks.

Again, most project management tools do not have a way of recording these decisions. Leading to a lot of time gone into calls & meetings that could be saved.

In Anywhere, we are approaching this problem as part of our basic design. When you are chatting with your team members about a certain task & you feel any particular comment is a Decision or a Blocker, you can mark it as a Decision or a Blocker accordingly.

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All Decisions & Blockers are neatly stacked & are available for you to review in real time. No more do you need to call your team members to know the reason why the tasks are Stuck or what new decisions are being made. Saving you & your team a lot of time. You can also see the historical chat to see the overall background & context of why your team marked a certain chat comment as a Decision or a Blocker.

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When going through the chat History, little icons will clearly tell you the chat messages marked as Decisions or Blockers.

You can also configure your board so that if a message is marked as a Blocker, the status of underlaying Task automatically changes to Stuck.

With Anywhere, you can also apply a Custom Filter to see all the tasks which are Stuck, save this as a Custom View & pin it on your Dashboard. Next time you are on your Anywhere Dashboard, you see all items which are stuck, click on them & you see why they are stuck. No more calling around.

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We believe small features like this are very important & will go a long way in your project management journey. Let us know what do you think about it? Do you have any more ideas to make this feature more meaningful to you? If yes, please share in the comments.

Lastly, you can click here to register your interest if you would like to try Anywhere for your teams. We are still running an early stage private beta & are allowing a selected few companies to be a part of our community to design the next generation of project management and team collaboration suite.