Workflow management system for teams

Software	PHP or ASP or JSP etc, HTML+CSS, optionally SQL
Covers	Web interface development, databases
Skills Required	Programming, database design
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ???

Brief Description

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.

Many activities get done in several stages that different people are responsible for. Some of these are one-off activities that have a different structure from anything the people involved have done before, but many others follow standard patterns within an organization. In either case it might be helpful for the team to know where a particular task as got to, for example a document that needs to get written by one person and then get read and signed off by a couple of managers after it's been edited by another.

The challenge of this project is to develop a software system that can enable teams of coworkers to manage the collaborative performance of large multi-stage tasks where different people may have responsibility for different parts of the process.

The system should enable users to construct a map of a multi-stage process and assign responsibility for each stage to one or more members of a group. If appropriate it should be possible to do this by editing a pre-existing template for a standard category of tasks or a plan for a previous similar task. The users should be able to see what activities have come due that they are responsible for, assert that they are now doing a particular activity, and assert that they have now completed an activity thus passing the work on to the next person responsible for the next stage in the process.

Extensions

Ideally, the tool should enable the construction of plans that are hierachical, so that a large sub-task can be treated as a unit at one level of planning, and as a more complicated multi-stage task where people have different responsibilities at a lower level of planning - perhaps planned out by a different person at a different time. It would also be a desirable feature to be able to assign responsibilities to groups, and allow users to be members of one or more groups.

Useful features include generating reports about open tasks, and sending alerts if tasks haven't been completed at certain points, or a certain length of time after they have been started.

The system might gain from including a document management system that enables users to open and save documents in a central repository. It would also gain from enabling users to pass along comments about particular tasks, either stored as strings in a database, or in separate files, or both depending on how substantial the comments are.

Back to