Challenges with Microsoft Project
At adidas all product development tasks are centrally planned with Microsoft Project (Calendar Management). Previously all tasks were manually exported to Excel and the Excel worksheet was published on the intranet website. Every employee needed to go to this sheet and to manually transfer a task to his (her) Outlook calendar. If changes were made, employees affected by them were manually notified by e-mail or needed to detect the change themselves. Any change then taken from the Excel worksheet and transferred manually to the calendar.
How adidas boosts efficiency with Allocatus
Since the implementation of Allocatus every employee can see all current tasks in a web view This means that every employee can see all tasks of all projects and can also find out which task is assigned to which team.
Team members are assigned tasks by the team leader in team meetings - not by Microsoft Project. After or during the meeting each team member selects their assigned tasks in the web view and links them with Allocatus to their personal Outlook calendar. Through this procedure, one can be sure that the tasks in the calendar are always up to date and that all changes have been logged.
The central planning team; their project managers (Calendar Leaders) and the people in the fulfilling teams responsible for time planning (Calendar Champs) save work because they no longer need to find out who needs to be notified if task changes have taken place.
Team members no longer need to regularly access the intranet site and no longer need to update their Outlook calendars and log changes. In addition, transfer errors no longer occur.
The Allocatus software has been in use since December 2004 with about 4000 users at about 30 sites worldwide.
More info about Allocatus Top-Down Planning
Allocatus can synchronize Microsoft Project tasks with the Outlook calendars or to-do lists of your team members automatically.
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