Doitall tells us about their experience in InnovaApps+

Doitall is a specialized cloud-based task management application. It intuitively displays color graphics of both past and future activities. Its creator tells you more about it.

When we face a major task or project, it seems as though we are standing in front of a mountain that is blocking our way of progressing in life, which appears impossible to climb given our skills and knowledge. We have three choices at this point: postponing the project, not doing it or trying to find a starting point for the challenging road ahead. Clearly, if we choose the latter option, we need coordination, hard work, knowledge, imagination, strong ability to solve problems, but above all a strategy that lets us take the first step in the right direction.

The idea of the first step can summarize a valid strategy. If we follow this concept, we could give more light to the road considering the "Divide and rule" premise, which is a leitmotiv for software development and can be naturally applied to all other areas of human activity. But what do we need to put these ideas into practice? How do we bring these simple concepts to our particular situation making our projects fail or succeed? Is success or failure associated with the chosen strategy? What we can say is that these questions are difficult to answer.

To try to materialize these ideas, I personally use planning as a strategy that is based on two principles: history and scheduling. To do this, the first thing I do is divide the project into separate tasks, and these in turn into even smaller tasks repeating the process until I obtain a list of actions that subjectively (for me or the people in my team) are indivisible or represent a low cost of implementation (compared with a peak). Based on the fact that they have similar tasks in terms of time or cost, they are recorded once completed in order to create a single history. Through this history it can be ascertained how many tasks are performed per week, per month, while these can also be classified by project type, task type, or for specific periods, such as setting start and end dates associated with seasons. This will be input to carry out the scheduling. Questions such as "How long will it take to implement a new project?" can be answered correctly by taking data from the history of individual projects such as the mean or average of the duties performed in a set period of time and framed within characteristic parameters. This technique can be extended to groups of people or teams ensuring the execution of the tasks is performed in a coordinated manner.

Doitall is an application for Android devices that is cloud based, which means that data is protected and backed up at all times on a server in the Internet and can be accessed securely from multiple connection points or instances that may include other platforms like the web as well as other operating systems. Doitall is a tool that helps you plan projects individually or in groups based on the rules of history and scheduling that were described previously.

Doitall is the winning application of the 1st award of the InnovaApps+ 2014 contest in the Organization Apps category. More than 114 projects in 13 countries entered the InnovaApps+ contest in four categories. The organization of the competition was flawless and communication with the organizers was open and fluid. In my opinion as a contestant, InnovaApps+ opens up significant opportunities within the current trend of global innovation-based entrepreneurship to people connected with management and improvement processes in small and medium businesses.

Generally productivity applications of the ToDoList type aim to remember actions that can be easily forgotten, such as taking clothes to the dry cleaners, making a call or reviewing a draft document, adding ubiquity and a good user experience. Doitall maintains this objective but places the emphasis on planning. In this respect, using the application can respond at any time to a recurring question in projects: "Where are we?" This in turn implies other questions such as "how much have we advanced?", "How much do we have to go?" or "will we be able to finish by the set date?"

It is said that technology is an extension of the human being. Technology gives us a kind of "super power", for example a car or plane allows us to move faster, a telephone or video conference software allows us to communicate over long distances, and thus any device that we highlight expands human ability to perform certain actions. It is also considered that for a technological element to be useful, the interaction between man and machine must flow well (which Fórmula 1 drivers should know well), because if this is not the case, the technological artifact is not an extension but a burden, which naturally ends up being discarded. Doitall was designed under this view of technology, seeking to expand human capacity to organize work, and realize projects in a satisfactory way, to undertake a continuous improvement based on an individual, common or shared history, to establish a balance through evaluation, measurement and timely correction of workloads.

Doitall is a task management tool that can be used in conjunction with any of the available methodologies for project development. The application has the key to become a useful tool in the everyday elements of small and medium enterprises, adding value to their processes by displaying in real time and the implementation of the concepts of history and scheduling related to planning.  Doitall application updates are frequently published in Google Play, where improvements and new features are included based on user response. A web version will soon be available.