Kids Digital Media Company Finds New Way to Work with Qtask

By Larry Hitchcock, kidthing

As CEO of kidthing, a start-up entertainment technology company, Larry Hitchcock was facing a dilemma.

“Qtask provided us with a viable and powerful way to integrate all those processes and discussions in one easy-to-track place, and as a result we were getting things done efficiently.”
-Larry Hitchcock, CEO of kidthing

It was already 8:30 AM, and he needed vital information from his team before an 11:00 AM conference call. And, like most days, Larry was rushing from one meeting to another, with only ten minutes or so free to make it happen. But despite having to reach ten different people working out of five locations in order to confirm they all had a common understanding of the issues - and secure their recommendations and agreement in order to finalize a plan, Larry wasn’t stressed. He had a secret weapon which would enable him to take five minutes now and guarantee that he get the information needed before the call, without having to chase the answers down.

Like many top executives today, Hitchcock found himself facing the challenges inherent with managing a multi-disciplinary team working on multiple tasks with varied technologies across disparate locations. How do you ensure that everyone is kept current, on schedule and on the same page? And, as management, how do you keep up-to-date on the multitude of discussions and project status necessary for proactive leadership?

The answer presented itself to Hitchcock when an industry colleague wanted to share an early peek at a project he’d been working on to help out the development process in his own company – a web-based unified collaboration and communication environment called Qtask. Hitchcock was intrigued enough with what he saw to integrate software into the pipeline of his then fledgling company.

Based in Los Angeles, kidthing is a kids’ digital media technology platform. Or as Hitchcock puts it, kidthing is “like iTunes for children’s literature, games, video and personal media.” Working with some of the world’s leading publishers, media companies and content creators, kidthing provides a secure place on the web for kids and their parents to purchase a wide variety of fun and entertaining learning content.

Like most creative, high-tech companies, kidthing is comprised of a number of business groups and diverse disciplines such as engineers, product managers, artists and animators, writers, sales and marketing, and other roles – each with their own “language” and way of working. Complicate this with an array of technologies not specifically designed to go together – such as client servers, streaming media players, encryption and secure web-based transactional ecommerce mechanisms – and it’s easy to see how challenging it would be to keep track of all the moving parts.

“Prior to adopting Qtask, we were using the typical tools and methods of collaborating – emails, attached files, FTP accounts – but each subgroup also had their own system of tracking their projects. It wasn’t unified and things were very dispersed across the organization,” stated Hitchcock.

With no sort of integrated or “communal” way for these groups to interact and work together, Hitchcock found that everyone was doing their own thing, which meant that much of the company’s communication processes were dispersed and needed to be more streamlined. “Qtask provided us with a viable and powerful way to integrate all those processes and discussions in one easy-to-track place, and as a result we were getting things done efficiently,” he added.

Qtask is a secure web-based service that lets either a team or an entire company communicate, collaborate and share information all in one place from anywhere. Built around the concept of projects, teams and tasks, Qtask intuitively lets users create a project, invite all the appropriate contributors, assign tasks, and then include all of the relevant documents, wikis, calendars and discussions – all in one place. This type of unified, transparent environment makes it easier to manage all team members and tasks at every level, and allows the group to focus on the results.

With Qtask it’s easy to know instantly the status of a task at any time over the course of a project. By enabling continuous and accurate updates of a task or project, every team member is just a click away from being “in the know.” In addition to automatically logging information changes, Qtask immediately notifies the project team of those changes. Discussions are automatically organized and pre-filed per project, services and topics. This helps enable compliance while making it easy to get new team members up to speed. Its foundation for accountability removes confusion over responsibility for undertaking and completing a task or assignment. Because of this transparent nature, Qtask fosters a higher level of work, ownership and trust among co-workers.

“As CEO, it has been difficult to have visibility across all of the dispersed groups using the traditional tools”, said Hitchcock. “Qtask provides an invaluable amount of visibility into the ongoing activities and working process of the company. In a very short amount of time I can review the company’s working activities and real time discussions about tasks and important company business. I can literally see the company working. That’s my favorite aspect of working with Qtask.”

In a real life case of necessity being the mother of invention, Qtask was created by Baron R.K. “Reichart” Von Wolfsheild, Qtask’s co-founder and CTO, as an incubator project and means of managing multiple teams and projects at Prolific Publishing, Inc. – a software development company Von Wolfsheild ran with Qtask CEO Russell Mix.

“Reichart and I had worked together on various entertainment and interactive software projects over the years, so we would occasionally bounce ideas off of one another,” said Hitchcock. “Being in software development, I had experience with a number of PPM software applications in the past and was encouraged by what he was creating. Qtask is different in that it can be implemented across a broad range of disciplines and functions. It’s an accessible way to capture discussions and data, creating a collective knowledge base and shared vocabulary or commonality across a diverse group.”

Qtask encompasses many of the features you would expect from a Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) solution, while adding Web 2.0 tools and a range of innovative global and project views of all services. In addition to discussions, wikis, file-sharing, contextual searches, and calendaring – complete with file attachment and discussions, Qtask also includes forms and compliance features and RSS syndication to easily share information and documents with people outside the Qtask environment. The user interface puts everything at one’s fingertips via a global dashboard that highlights and ‘humanizes’ the team, adding a social network aspect to Qtask.

“We actually used Qtask to develop Qtask, and learned a great deal in the process,” said Qtask’s Von Wolfsheild. “It was imperative that we structured all of the functions and services logically – in a way that people actually think and work, so it would be accessible to a broad range of fields, processes and job roles.”

Getting started with Qtask is relatively quick and easy. It requires no customization, no implementation time and no resources to maintain.More importantly it requires no installation help from IT, so new users are up and running within minutes after being invited to a project.

Added Hitchcock, “For those who have previously used project management, knowledge database and PPM software applications, getting up to speed in Qtask was a snap. But for some of the team, it was a little bit of a challenge at first. They weren’t accustomed to that type of documenting tasks and the overall participatory nature of the environment, so their migration was a bit more gradual. However, Qtask is a great platform for sharing and capturing discussions, so now it is almost fully adopted throughout kidthing.”

Qtask helps bring clarity to each element of a project. It facilitates agreement upon what each task is and what it means. Qtask lets everyone see what everyone else is doing, which is critical in a start-up company such as kidthing, where there is overlap and people have to wear more than one hat. “As it generally is with most companies, every task feels like a priority. Having an environment such as Qtask, which transparently shows how coworkers are doing with the tasks they’ve agreed to be accountable on, just streamlines our ability to accomplish the work we need to achieve, he continued.”

One significant project where Qtask proved its value was early in the development of the kidthing downloadable client. Before embarking on the next phase of development, the team performed a review of every task – creating a list of task descriptions, projected time requirements and priorities encountered in the first phase. Qtask not only helped to clarify and document each task, it facilitated agreement upon each description and time requirement. More importantly, it captured knowledge of the actual time each task took, providing reality to workflow projections. The whole post-mortem process was completed in two days, highlighting potential bottlenecks, efficiencies and priorities for the next phase through actual, objective information. Qtask provided the tools to make the process better moving forward.

“We’re able to work through process development, record and publish the process through wikis, and get new people up to speed instantly,” said Hitchcock. Qtask allowed us to accomplish in 90 days what would otherwise have taken six months. That is the most valuable thing that Qtask has done for kidthing.”

A Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that can effortlessly scale to meet the needs of any size company or group, Qtask works on any device that can access the Web, including PCs, Macs, and browser-enabled cell phones, ensuring that one can stay connected whenever and from wherever they want.

“There’s no way I would go back to the way we did things prior to introducing Qtask, because it meant more than 500 emails a day and no way to filter or parse out what’s really important. I wouldn’t be able to see all that I can with Qtask – much less from anywhere. With Qtask’s browser and mobile phone compatibility, I can access it from anywhere and see what’s happening at all times.”

For more information about kidthing, please visit www.kidthing.com.

To celebrate their recent launch, Qtask is offering their service free for the first five users on a single account for the first year, and includes five hours of training, for all accounts signed by December 31, 2008. Each additional user is charged $25 per month during this special launch offer – a 50% savings of the standard $50 charge. Also included in the pricing are unlimited number of projects, unlimited access to video lessons and online technical support, and a 60-day money back guarantee.

For more information about Qtask, please visit: www.Qtask.com.