Innovative Design and Construction Company Ditches Email and Lays the Framework for Better Communication

Erik Debono, the design manager for the UCG Australia team, utilizes Workast to clean up the mess that email left behind. The software helps him to keep track of his team of designers as they work to get Australia’s National Broadband Network up and running.

Assigning tasks via email is all fun and games until you’re 200 messages deep with no clue who was supposed to work on what on your big project.

Actually, that’s a stretch. Assigning tasks via email is absolutely not fun. It’s nearly impossible to get things done. Managing multiple projects at once exponentially increases your frustration. Without an effective way to organize and allocate tasks, project management becomes a nightmare.

Erik Debono experienced this firsthand. His design team needed to find a solution fast.

Nation Telecommunication is a Major Task

Universal Communications Group or UCG is an Australian-based design and construction company that serves the telecommunication industry. They work to survey and design fiber networks to enable internet access across the country.

UCG has teams in both Australia and New Zealand that work from the bottom-up to survey and design the layout for fiber networks. Currently, the growing company is working to aid the rollout of the Ultra-Fast Broadband Network in New Zealand and the National Broadband Network in Australia.

Being deeply involved with not one, but two nation-wide fiber network projects is kind of a big deal. A huge deal, actually. Now imagine using email to effectively communicate and assign tasks among the 200+ employees working for both the Australian and New Zealand teams of UCG.

If it sounds impossible, that’s because it is.

Email is great, but when it comes to managing large projects and teams it simply isn’t enough. Erik figured that out soon enough.

Growing Pains

Despite starting with only himself and 3 other designers two years ago, Erik’s design team has exploded in number and now boasts over 56 employees. As the company grew larger, so did their communication problem.

“I would assign tasks via email, but of course, things get lost in email. And then the work got bigger and bigger and we just found that tracking things via email just wasn’t sustainable anymore.”

Projects wouldn’t get done on time and there was no way to track tasks. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a quick solution. It wasn’t until the team’s commercial manager suggested Workast during a management retreat.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose

Implementing Workast was a breeze. They worked to set up accounts for their HR and finance teams. Erik’s team relied on Workast Elite to resolve any issues that came up. All of his team members welcomed the change, they saw the benefit of making things more efficient when assigning tasks.

“I create action items for my lead designers based on meetings that I’ve had with them. They then create tasks. Each lead designer will create a job and assign it to a certain designer in their team on a daily basis.

It helps them work out when they can have things completed and helps them assign tasks because they know who is going to be free when.

So there are tons of things that we create in Workast. Of course, I also use the personal tasks function to help manage my day-to-day.”

No Slacking

Erik’s team doesn’t even use Slack. Their only reason for having an account is so that they can utilize Workast’s features. While Slack integration has been very beneficial for our customers, we’re working on transforming Workast into a standalone software. Not using Slack hasn’t stopped Erik from using Workast every day.

“It allows me to see where things are at from a quick overview level. I can see if there are any outstanding or old tasks. I can keep track of all the programs. I’ve given both business and program access to Workast and they can see how their programs are going.

It saves them the time and effort of having to come to me to ask me where things are at. They just view the tasks and projects in one place where they can see any notes and due dates.”

Bills, Bills, Bills

A tool that saves you both time and money is hard to come by. Using Workast has stopped Erik from having to worry about resources or spending time searching for things. Not to mention, the increase in efficiency is a major bonus.

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About Workast

Workast is a “Slack-first” collaborative task management tool. It is used by teams to create tasks, organize daily work, manage projects and track productivity. Workast brings a 360° view of what teams are working on to help them get more work done. Workast is based in Los Angeles, California.