Asking a colleague or a department for something

Why tasks and not Slack

A request written in Slack has no owner and no end. It scrolls away, nobody knows if it was seen, and a week later someone asks again. A task is the same sentence with an owner and a done, so both sides can stop worrying about it. The discussion still happens in chat: every task opens a staff chat conversation named after it, with the same translation, replies, photos and quick replies described in Talking to colleagues in staff chat.

Raising a task

Open Tasks in the left menu and press New task. Type what needs doing, then choose either a person or a department. That is all. Details, a due date and an urgency are there if you need them, but most tasks do not.

Two shortcuts save the trip to the Tasks page:

• From the page it is about. Product, customer, order and delivery note pages have a Task button in their header. A task raised there is linked to that record, so whoever picks it up lands on the right product or order with one click, and the page shows a chip for every open task about it.
• From a chat message. Hover any message in staff chat and press task. The message becomes the subject, and a reply in the original conversation says which task was raised, so the person who asked can follow it.

Person or department

Ask a person when you know who should do it. They get the task straight away and it shows under Assigned to me on their Tasks page.

Ask a department when you do not, for example the warehouse or marketing. The task sits in that department's queue, visible to everyone in it under My department. Whoever picks it up presses I will do it and becomes the owner. Departments come from job positions, nothing to set up.

Engineers and QA cannot be given a task. Anything for them is a ticket, see Asking the help desk for help.

Working through tasks sent to you

The Tasks page has three views:

• Assigned to me: tasks that are yours.
• My department: the queue of your department, waiting for someone to pick them up.
• I asked for: tasks you raised, so you can see how they are getting on.

Each task has four buttons: I will do it to claim it, Working on it, Done, and Can't be done, which asks you for a short reason. Every change is posted in the task's thread, so the person who asked sees it without being told. The thread icon opens the conversation to ask a question, attach a photo or say it is finished.

Show closed lists what was finished or dropped.

When nothing happens

A task that has been quiet for two days gets a nudge: the owner is reminded, or if nobody has claimed it yet, the supervisors of the department are told it is waiting. The reminder repeats every two days until the task moves. There is nothing to configure and no other deadline; a due date on a task is information for the person doing it, not a rule.

The board and the reports

Board shows the same tasks as columns, Todo, Working on it, Done, Can't be done, for the period chosen at the top, with filters by department, urgency and assignee. Supervisors can drag a card from one column to another to change its status; everyone else sees the board read only.

Reports shows, for the chosen period, how many tasks were raised and done, how long they take, how many have been open for more than a week, and the same numbers by department, by assignee and by requester. All is the plain list of every task with filters and search.