Last night at 7:49 PM (EST), we logged our 15,000th task in our task management system.
Our first task, ever logged in our custom built, RustyBrick® Task Manager, was on June 23, 2002 at about the same time of the day. Back then, Ronnie and I created all the tasks. Actually for a year or so after, we created all the tasks. Let me step back a bit. A task in our Task Manager, is a piece of a project that must get done for a whole project to get done. So if a client wants us to build out a web application, we will break down the web application into specific tasks, could be a handful or could be hundreds. Then programmers work on these tasks until they complete all of them.
So in the early days, Ronnie and I created each of these tasks. But we ultimately wanted our clients to take control and create their own tasks. In addition, we wanted our developers to do that as well. Over the course of the years, clients and our developers began creating tasks on their own. In fact, today, I personally rarely ever create a task. These days, we create tasks by the dozen each day. We probably create several hundred tasks per month. So if I had to chart the number of tasks we create month by month, you would probably see a huge steep line going up.
What is special about task number 15,000 is not only that it is number 15,000, but that a client created the task. We love when clients take the steering wheel and make their own detailed tasks.
We live and die by our RustyBrick Task Manager. It not only keeps our clients apprised of where we are with their projects, it also runs our daily business actives. We bill from it, we project manage front it, we project into the future with it, we interact with clients through it, we give bonuses from it, we power ambient orbs from it and much much more. It is our life line.
Congrats to the RustyBrick team and clients for reaching this awesome milestone!


Comments
CONGRATS TO ALL
GLAD TO SEE U GUYS DOING A GOOD JOB
Posted by: CONGRATS | November 7, 2007 2:55 PM
It appears we run things in a similar way.
Except mine is based on Cerberus Help Desk System with some mods (following "getting things done" book. Still, I'm at 7,200 since 2002 (I'm one guy!) Like you, it's my lifeline.
I would *LOVE* it if my clients would simply use the thing. Instead, they send tasks to my personal in-box or voice mail and i have to copy and paste (yes, my voice mail system does transcription.) This adds delays and inaccuracies they could avoid by simply logging in or sending an email to the right address. I think many feel just because I use a task system that they're going on the "back burner" - when in fact it's the opposite!
Oh well, at least stuff isn't getting lost!
Posted by: Scott Clark | November 7, 2007 4:46 PM
"back burner" -- our clients used to feel that way, but now we are very bureaucratic, so they love it. j/k
It is the only way it can work.
A task is made, it hooks into our test environment, CVS (versioning), into billing, etc. Without it, not only would we forget to do the task, we would not be able to actually do it because it would not be version'ed and archived, nor would we be able to bill for it.
Posted by: Barry Schwartz | November 7, 2007 4:51 PM
Mazel Tov!
Customer First!
Posted by: Leon Schwartz | November 9, 2007 4:17 PM