Recently there is a growing trend to use whatsapp collaboration as a task management app. I was talking to one startup that deals in delivery services, they have around 40 employees and they have 20 whatsapp groups to manage coordination among employees and delivery persons for successful delivery of products to consumers. I asked them how do you manage such big number of groups? They said, though they have problems in managing all groups but they don’t have any alternative. Hence, the problem is can WhatsApp be used for managing tasks? This is not the problem with this company but others too.
A task management needs to have a todo with time, a task and then a supervisor and owner who needs to see if task is completed. A task also need to remind the owner just before task started. For a group task, it needs to remind all participants and help them communicate with each other like whatsapp does. Whatsapp is a communication platform and it used to communicate between people. And one part of task management process is to have an effective communication and thats where whatsapp comes into but the core of an effective task management process is not only communication but also timely reminder, monitoring too. The good part with whatsapp is that number of people using whatsapp quite quite large, that makes it a de facto way of communication and collaboration. You can communicate with people immediately who is on whatsapp and has net connection. It does not give you reminder or snoozing the task. It also does not give you freedom to repeat the task. With growing trend of using for a task collaboration among people is self detrimental, it makes more complex. Objective of any task manager app is to save time, collaboration effectively and timely reminder. It needs a specialized application that would help on these activities. Whatsapp would be solving on portion i.e. communication, but other factors those are more important in execution are completely missing. In fact by using WhatsApp for team collaboration is not going to help in long run. Instead of optimizing time, it would lead to spending more time managing tasks. If any communication has some important information then user need to search and there is a high chance that you miss it giving the volume of data exchanged in whatsapp.
The other important factor that I feel which is missing from whatsapp’s feature list is real time status update and push notification whether a task is completed or not. If a task has multiple subtasks and you have shared the task with your peer and need to get real time status update on sub tasks then you need to better use a task manager that would help you on this. And planning is completely missing.
In summary, for a better planning, collaboration, communication and execution you need to use a task manager that gives you these features, instead of using a communication tool like whatsapp.