| Bank of American Fork
Bank of American Fork (Bank of AF) was established in 1913 and currently has 11 branches in Utah and over $800 million in assets.
| Why We Chose @task
Our biggest challenge was coordination on projects, more specifically, information on status and responsibility within projects, both in terms of roles completing certain functions and accountability of team members for their portion of the work.
Prior to @task, we didn’t have any project management software in place. Bank of AF has a custom-built Intranet feature that was used to initiate projects and mark their completion. Status updates used to consist of a “yes/no” interview about whether a project was being worked on, but this solution didn’t give an accurate picture of project status or a big picture of the resources that were being used; it wasn’t really a project management application.
In looking for a project management application, we looked at MS Project and a couple of big solutions, like Clarity. They seemed geared for huge firms and were really expensive. We didn’t see a need to spend a lot. I don’t have formal project manager training—nobody here does. We were looking for a simple tool. We needed something web-based and easy to use; we needed it to be easy to train our employees on.
| Why @task was the Right Choice
@task is very feature-rich—much better than MS Project. A big advantage is the organizational capacity to manage all our projects. We’re the resource for the entire bank, and @task gives us that management capability to deal with all the requests from whatever department or committee they come from. I have projects from a million dollar long-term project to simple one-day projects in @task.
@task also tells us quickly who is responsible for what. For example, right now we are upgrading all of our communication systems. It’s a big project that may last as long as a year and requires phasing and individual rollouts by branch. As we go through the process of executing the tasks in the project, we can quickly see who has responsibility for each area. Then, when we discover problems, we can do our project autopsies on the fly and make notes about things we need to apply to new projects in @task.
We also use @task when marketing needs us to build a new web application, and we get a request to build and implement it for tracking the data they need to evaluate a new campaign. It all goes into @task. These projects typically range from fairly lightweight to something that might take several months. In addition, acquisitions are a big part of our industry, and as we look at acquisitions, project management is really important for us.
