Right, so I figured, let’s get this new project management tool set up for the team. Saw a demo, looked slick, promised to make everything smooth as silk. “This’ll be a game changer,” I thought. Famous last words, eh?
So, I kicked things off by signing up for the trial. Easy enough. Then came the inviting the team part. Sent out all the invites. First snag: half of them went to spam. Spent a good hour troubleshooting that, telling people to check their junk folders. Not a great start, but hey, teething problems, right?
Then we tried to import our existing tasks from the old system. They had this “easy import” feature. Click, click, upload CSV. It churned for a bit. And then… nothing. Well, not nothing. It imported about a third of the tasks, jumbled up the assignees on another third, and the rest just vanished into the digital ether. Brilliant.
The Real Mess Begins
Okay, deep breath. We decided to just start fresh with a small, new project. Let’s just add tasks manually, I said. How hard can that be? We started adding tasks, assigning deadlines, trying to create dependencies. That’s when we found out that setting a simple “Task B can’t start until Task A is done” was hidden under about five sub-menus. And even then, it only worked half the time. The interface, which looked so clean in the demo, was actually a maze.
We pushed on for a whole week trying to make this thing work. People were spending more time fighting the tool than doing their actual jobs.
- Notifications were either a constant flood or non-existent. No in-between.
- The mobile app was a completely different beast, missing half the features.
- Trying to get a clear overview of who was doing what and when it was due? Forget it. It was like looking at a bowl of spaghetti.
Then came the moment. We had a critical deadline approaching. I went to check the project status, get a report. The report generator just spun. And spun. Then errored out. “Unexpected error, please try again later.” Tried again. Same thing. The whole reporting module was down. And this was the paid version we’d just upgraded to, thinking it might fix the earlier glitches!
That was it. The final straw. All that effort, all that time trying to get it to bend to our will, and it just flat out broke when we needed it most. All our carefully entered data for that new project? Who knows where it went. We couldn’t even export it properly to go back to the old system without a massive headache. It had all, absolutely, gone Pete Tong. We just stared at the screen, then at each other. Back to spreadsheets it was, with our tails between our legs. What a waste of a week. Still get a bit twitchy thinking about it.