Most project management software focus more on providing task boards, ability to add tasks from chat applications like slack. However, the burden to send reminders if a task’s status was not updated, escalating a task if it was running behind, translating meeting notes into tasks, etc.
A common task that executive struggles with is constantly checking if people have updated the status, and then messaging the relevant team members if they have not.
Imagine an AI Status both that could be communicate to a spreadsheet, or to an application like Trello or JIRA.
A status checker and reminder bot will have to do two things :
- Access a spreadsheet, check if an entry has been made, and if not then send a message to the person.
- It should send a reminder if a task is exceeding a certain time limit or overdue
- Should create a new spreadsheet copying the tasks from the previous day, and then asking the user to update the status on those tasks
- It should have a way to talk to it by telling it assign this task to person A, B, C and then those entries can be added in the spreadsheet
- For each task that is assigned it should make sure that there is a person who is supposed to be doing the task and then there is a person that is supposed to review that tasks, and escalation list if the task is running late
- It co-ordinates between the three, it reminds the task owner reminders to update the status of the task, when the task is complete, it sends a message to the reviewer, and escalates a task if it is running late.
Along with a status checker bot you also need an AI bot which can listen into a meeting, take notes, and then convert the notes into action items, and then guess who the action item belongs to, and if it can’t figure it out, then messages the meeting owner to clarify the tasks.
- Being able to import the audio, and the associated transcript
- Being able to convert the transcript, into a list of action items with the owner of the task
- Confirming the task list with the meeting owner
- Sending the confirmed task list to the status checker bot
If done well, an AI system here, could simply make an office extremely productive. The next step in this AI vision is a focus bot. The job of the focus bot will be able to ensure that people are only working on one thing at a time, and the thing that they are working on has the highest impact on the KPIs. The bot will, again check the status sheet and ensure that one person is not having multiple tasks assigned to them and if one person has been assigned multiple things then it would escalate the list of multiple tasks and will ask the task assigner to prioritise.
The roadmap bot will take the unassigned tasks and suggestions into a backlog list. The roadmap bot will categorize the tasks based on various teams (e.g. marketing, QA, design, development, dev operations, etc.), it would have the ability to merge different tasks together, identify duplicate tasks, and combine tasks to create a more comprehensive tasks
- Make sure the roadmap tasks are prioritised and mapped to the OKRs
- Ensure that tasks are not duplicate, and provide a way to merge two overlapping tasks
- Classify a task to the right team