27/09/2018, 22:51

How AI is set to disrupt the workflow management space?

I have donned many roles in my short but eventful professional career so far. Corporate Strategy, Product Marketing, Enterprise Sales, Business Development and Strategic Partnerships. Every stint of mine has demanded that I multitask with efficiency and make sure the team I am leading is productive ...

I have donned many roles in my short but eventful professional career so far. Corporate Strategy, Product Marketing, Enterprise Sales, Business Development and Strategic Partnerships. Every stint of mine has demanded that I multitask with efficiency and make sure the team I am leading is productive to the hilt.

And that's precisely why the workflow management space, with the likes of Trello, Jira, Asana etc., have been so successful with their value propositions; because they solve real-time problems that management professionals like you and me, have long been wracking our brains for.

The biggest challenge that these tools help you solve - How do we get maximum productivity out of our teams for a given unit of time?

And yet, none of these SaaS-based tools has been able to combine features that could serve as a one-stop shop for seamless Project Management. That's precisely the reason why we thought we should build Agilean.

There are still tasks that aren't automated by workflow management tools out there The leaders in workflow management, like Trello, Jira, Asana are highly valued by users for their intuitive user interfaces, visualization of tasks as a 'Kanban Board' and reporting abilities on lead and cycle time. Especially with drag and drop capabilities, tracking the progress of tasks in a complex project becomes a breeze, thereby enhancing accountability within a team.

And yet, when you're in a team meeting, these tools can't capture/record and process out the key action points. You still probably have to assign the responsibility of capturing the minutes of the meeting to the junior most member of your team. And tracking tasks that run in parallel within a given time period could still be tricky business, without the visualization of these tasks through Gantt Charts.

That's why we thought we should come up with a tool which allows you to rather focus on the meeting, than worry about whether the key action points or decisions are being captured or whether tasks emerging out of the meeting are being prioritized or not. With Agilean, you just focus on the meeting and let its agile oriented AI engine take care of the rest.

Agilean - a new age 'Agile' and 'Lean' workflow management leverages the power of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding with the conventional project management techniques (read Gantt Charts, Kanban Boards, Scrum workflow) and makes project management a breeze for you.

Now the question you may ask is 'Why AI?' and 'How can AI help with workflow management'? It's pretty simple. Artificial Intelligence lets Agilean automate the mundane tasks and activities that even the best of the SaaS-based tools out there might not be doing. And yet these 'mundane' tasks hold their own in a complex project.

Let me list them out:

* Ability to automatically record minutes of the meeting and capture them in more than the templatized format

* Ability to process the recorded minutes and screen out key action points, decisions are taken.

* Gantt charts visualized on a single dashboard so that multitasking and task prioritization becomes easy.

* Limits on WIP and WIP violations so that your team has an incentive to convert a WIP to a 'finished task' ASAP.

* Ability to identify impediments in a project and enabling a strategy to be put in place to monitor, control and close these impediments/bottlenecks.

* And to top it up, how many workflow management tools out there have an ability to let you continuously identify and improve processes? Well, Agilean has that ability and lets you do the same by enabling the retrospective analysis of each release.

Imaging Agilean doing all these and much more by leveraging Artificial Intelligence. This is why we think AI will make workflow management in a project much more easier. Because, you now don't have to worry anymore that those endless standup or retrospective meetings in an agile project aren't yielding enough action points or feedback. Agilean, using AI, lets you save time that you could have otherwise spent on the various aspects of an agile project, thereby making the workflow much more leaner and easier to manage.

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