Achieving accountability is relatively simple for a single task. However as the number of tasks increases, achieving accountability becomes harder and harder. Unfortunately in the real world, most people are involved in many tasks, so a simple way to manage personal and organisational accountability is urgently need.
The basic building block of accountability is a single task. With bigger tasks and projects, simply a number of single tasks aligned and implemented together.
Each single task has a context and workflow of To Do’s required to complete the task. So each stakeholder knows what is happening and what they need to do, when and with whom. That is, personal accountability is made explicit in a practical, understandable form for each task.
TASKey has developed web software (called Me2Team) that makes it easy to explicitly work out and sustain accountability for one or many people involved in a single task. The software sorts through and coordinates relevant tasks and To Do’s for many people doing many tasks to:
· ensure that stakeholder involvement is managed in real-time,
· show the tasks that each person needs-to-know about,
· produce personal To Do lists so each person knows what to do, when and with whom,
· inform stakeholders when something that affects them changes,
· record what has been done,
· eliminate constraints from organisation structures, geographic and time zone separation, and to
· update tasks and To Do’s 7x24 one step at a time.
In other words, the software transparently manages the most difficult parts of accountability, so people can do what they need to do at the right place at the right time with the right people and progressively record what they have done. Plus progress is shown in real-time, so decision making can be timely and informed.
The basic building block for Me2Team is an amazingly simple task plan template that makes it easy to develop a task plan in minutes. The template has all the information required for accountability: goal, assumptions, objectives, To Do’s (workflow) with person responsible, stakeholders and non people resources. The template has been used by tens of thousands of people in over 175 countries; so we know it works.
Now otherwise incredibly complex organisational and personal accountability is available to everyone with minimal training. The key is that all stakeholders know what is happening and what they need to do, with the complex accountability administration being automatically done for users.