And for every day in these two years, I’ve felt my team is not using activeCollab to its fullest. We dealt with a lot of emotions – inertia, confusion, lack of clarity, overwhelm, neglect and resignation. I demonstrated activeCollab features to my team, had team leaders personally teach their subordinates, pushed people to log everything in PMS, offered incentives for it, threatened to cut salary wages if they do not log hours and a whole bunch of other tricks. Yet participation levels were below my expectations. Some members still found it difficult / unintuitive / out of their flow to get into activeCollab and track their work.

After months of fighting, I realized that this phenomenon is not limited to us. It’s universal.

Here’s the proof for it, results from our recent customer survey. Here’s what people said they find most difficult with activeCollab.

What's most difficult with activeCollab?

34% of 120 respondents to our recent customer survey said “My team hasn’t embraced it as much as I wanted them to”.

The number one reason for non-achievement is non-action. One way to encourage action is to make it very simple to take action. If people think it’s easy to perform an action, they are more likely to do it.

Sure, this is a core design principle for our products. One recent addition to our suite of products for activeCollab is Quick Add Plus. We installed Quick Add Plus on our system a while back. Only a few people knew about it so I got the whole team together and did a quick demo.

Here’s a comment I got on our PMS soon after:

Using activeCollab after a long time... Thanks to that "Q" thing...

My team found it less confusing and easier with Quick Add Plus. It lets you press “q” key on your keyboard to bring up Quick Add window. It even lets you add new tasks and track time on specific tickets / tasks right from that window. Basically, the most important, most common actions can now be initiated with a single key press – from anywhere in activeCollab.

This sudden discovery shot up team participation. The PMS is now a pleasure to use!

I knew Quick Add Plus is useful, but am delighted to see it’s brought people back to activeCollab!

What if you could simplify actions for your team? How can you make complex things enjoyable?

Watch a video and learn more about Quick Add Plus from here.

Do you use Quick Add Plus or any of our other products? What’s been your experience?

(Image courtesy Bassi Baba)

From: Brian of RealisingPotential
To: Nirav Mehta
Subject:  Quick Add Plus is fantastic

Hi Nirav,

Talk about perfect timing. I came away from our management meeting today
with two of our directors saying that they found entering data, in this case
timesheet information, into AC was painful and slow. I promised that I would
look at this and purchased Quick Add Plus, installed it this evening,
created a quick sheet for them showing how it works and they are exceedingly
happy. This is a great add on and I would encourage all of your users to
give it a try, at $27 it is an absolute bargain!!

Best regards,
Brian

I sent a thank you email to him and here’s Brian’s reply after an hour.

Hi Nirav,

Happy to provide a testimony as this has saved me a lot of time,
even in the past few hours it has more than paid for itself. 
We are just restructuring our project templates and project
structures now that we have been playing with it for a few
months, the Planning Module is fantastic and the only thing
that I am missing tonight is one more indent to cover the
project definitions that I am working through but I can
overcome this :-)

Best regards,
Brian

I am very glad our products are saving you time and energy. That’s really our intention and it gives me joy to hear such stories

Working on better time reports

So while we save you hours by making activeCollab more efficient, we are also working on an enhancements to Time Reports that will make it easier to review the time your team is tracking. Time Reports Plus will allow grouping time records by Project, Users, Date and Billable Status. You will be able to see a nested view of these, and can also quickly update their status / move them to trash!

Malay Ladu from our team is working on getting this to feature complete. We will then apply any finishing touches, prepare a demo video and post it for you guys!

Lot of other interesting things happening…

There is tons of things happening on my side. I am actually thrilled and will share more updates as we keep checking off items from our assignments list!

Wish you another productive day!

Guido mentions that since activeCollab is web based, it is much easier to get all parties involved together. Communication is smoother and customers can participate in the development process.

They also use our Planning and Reports modules for activeCollab and said:

Reports we use internally for all projects and looking around to see how many hours the various components in a project cost and whether it matches the data in the planning module.

With this understanding we can better estimate for new projects, see where any bottlenecks, thus increasing our efficiency.

I am glad our products help increase efficiency and better track your projects Guido!

Thanks for sharing your story.

How are you using activeCollab / our products?