By Steve Borsch

In a time when uncertainty is accelerating, budgets have been cut and revenues downtrending, threats from terrorism and epidemics (e.g., avian flu) are increasingly driving companies and individuals to better anticipate and manage risk, we all need better tools. The embrace of the Getting Things Done system by an ever increasing number of individuals and organizations — and those of us who recognize that collaboration is more critical than ever before — continue to seek tools that are easy to use, fast, intuitive while helping us to be more productive, creative and efficient, especially as we’re increasingly mobile.

The mobile reality is that more of us are accelerating our mobile and multiple internet-connected device usage (e.g., laptops or smartphones accessing over wifi or wireless cellular networks) — while still desiring the use of data that originates on our desktop machines or that which resides online in the ‘cloud’ — and you have the key motivators that were behind the creation of a new, collaborative application with a GTD twist.

A successful entrepreneur and chief technologist (he was formerly CTO of HighJump Software), CEO Steve Kickert’s Riverock Technologies recently launched OnePlace, an online collaboration and GTD tool that has a good shot at being a hub positioned directly in the sweet spot of what’s needed today.

I had a chance to grab coffee with Kickert recently and what is usually a one to one-and-a-half hour discussion turned into three hours! We hit it off and delved deeply into GTD and collaboration, the participation culture that’s emerged on the Web making hosted online applications strongly desired by we increasingly always-on and always-connected people, and then went off on lots of tangents while discussing what’s needed to make OnePlace the gold-standard of collaborative apps.

Collaboration, and even GTD organization, when delivered as a “Web 2.0” application is in a fairly crowded space and competing within it isn’t for the faint-of-heart. The directory site GO2WEB20.net shows many types of collaborative applications — Basecamp, Central Desktop and others that are well established — but there are apps shoved into this category such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Twine, Skrbl and many others that don’t fit most people’s idea of what a collaborative or GTD application is or should be since they’re myopically focused on one, specific type of collaboration.

If one moves up the collaboration value chain to what’s used in the enterprise, then the competition for Web collaborative applications gets broader (as well as significantly more complicated and expensive) and includes software from IBM, Microsoft, Google and many others. These vendors offer massively scalable platforms for collaboration that include unified messaging, web conferencing, document management and a host of other integrated software that is perfect for a huge enterprise, but is usually a bazooka-to-kill-an-ant for a team, small to midsize organization, for those working on an initiative together or even a family to use that needs to coordinate and orchestrate activities.

GTD Elements Within OnePlace
In addition to being a competitive and focused collaboration application, OnePlace allows a GTD’er to live by most of the rules as outlined by David Allen. The bulk of the GTD philosophy guides individuals on how to ‘behave’ to get things done and in OnePlace, they’ve taken it one step further and provide you with tools that allow you AND your teams to behave in very much the same way. Kickert believes that part of the reason people fall off the GTD wagon is because, while diligent in following all the GTD philosophies, others around them are not. It is difficult to stay organized and productive when others you’re working and/or collaborating with aren’t in sync with GTD or focused on priorities like you are.

As OnePlace was created and as it evolves, Kickert and his team have been engaged in research around what businesses typically provide to their teams (and their individual contributors) to help them collaborate and stay organized to get more work done and achieve successful outcomes. Almost all businesses provide email which, unfortunately, ends up as the default team collaboration tool and almost all of the organizations they’ve surveyed provide absolutely nothing (besides yellow legal pads or Post-It notes!) to help an individual get/stay organized.

The first thing the OnePlace team did was to fix that key problem by combining a GTD productivity system, team collaboration, and true project management functionality into OnePlace. This ensures that your teammates are using the same tools as you are and that all work created at the team level is reflected in your personal weekly/daily plan. It also ensures that all the sharing and dialogue that typically occurs within a team is collected within OnePlace. One of the bonuses already seen by OnePlace users is how it ends up as a rich resource of searchable knowledge that is built up over time as it’s used by teams and their individual members.

The OnePlace team also added specific features that are both directly and indirectly related to GTD and, I might add, are really useful:

All facets of your life
OnePlace is a solution that really works for your organizational needs for all facets of life. Often this “we can be your personal and organization hub” is lip-service with most other collaboration applications. As more of us recognize and experience the blurring of the lines between work and life, there is no question that as the always-on, always-connected Millenials (Generation Y) move into the workforce, these tech savvy folks are going to demand this work/life connection and already are bringing tools they use in their personal lives to work (e.g., just look at how Twitter has inserted itself into daily use).

Scheduling your work
As I’ve utilized GTD in my own life, I’ve found that scheduling is a missing element in the GTD philosophy and one that is implemented within OnePlace. Scheduling within OnePlace gives you the ability to actually plan when you are going to do the work and this often help me manage my pile of work efficiently. Kickert uses the term set it and forget it to describe this feature. It allows a OnePlace user to process their inputs once in an efficient manner and provides leaders, colleagues, and others in their life with some level of visibility into available time for, and ability to complete, work they’ve been assigned.

Ubiquitous Capture - inbasket
As a GTD’er, you know all too well that not every input which comes into your life has a home right away. Is it a task or is it a project? Is it something I want to delegate? Is it something that I want to do now or file away? The inbasket is used as a place to hold your inputs until you have the time or know how to process them.

Power of Focus - Workplaces and Contexts
I have pretty significant ADD (which I actually view as a strength and why I’m able to “connect the dots”) so the ability to remove input from my field of view is critical in order to allow me to focus. There are numerous focusing features within OnePlace but the two that stand out are workplaces and contexts. A big bonus is that a OnePlace workplace also allows the entire team to focus. Teams constantly mix up priorities and therefore create inefficiencies that can easily be avoided with more focused organization. Contexts are, of course, a direct mapping to the GTD philosophy. Being able to set your current context allows you to filter out work that you cannot do and therefore allows you to focus on what you can.

Sequencing - Next Action
This is probably the area of GTD that is a weakness for OnePlace. Core to GTD is the belief that you only need to worry about what the ‘next action’ is for any given project and focus on completing that action. OnePlace allows users to sequence a project and has a somewhat similar concept, and this will undoubtedly evolve over time if GTD’ers demand it.

Promotion of tasks to projects
Most people make the mistake of thinking something is a task when it’s really a project. In OnePlace you’re empowered to promote a task to a project at any time.

Time tracking
Time tracking is not really thought about when talking about GTD. However, Kickert and crew found that by estimating all tasks and scheduling everything, a OnePlace user is able to keep from overbooking oneself and missing commitments. It also works as a nice incentive to keep your head down working since you can quickly see that you have “n” hours of work left. Without time tracking, all tasks appear equal.

So what is the OnePlace target market?
In our time together I grew to appreciate that Kickert is a guy that understands supply chains (the focus of High Jump’s business where he spent 16 years as CTO) and that he also appreciates and understands the value chain of collaboration, the power and pull of GTD, and what’s needed to empower people to leverage both in today’s net-connected world.

Accessible systems to do light task management with an unfortunate multiple-versions-of-the-truth (e.g., email and Outlook), or those to manage chaos (like what OnePlace offers) all the way to monolithic systems (from big vendors that are enterprise-only focused) are each miles apart in ease-of-use, accessiblity and learning curves. With OnePlace, Kickert is more interested in enabling and empowering individuals, teams and businesses, without necessarily focusing (for now) on the precise size of the business.

What did I like about OnePlace?
It’s easy to use and within 15 minutes I’d tried out and started using most of the key features that enabled project/task management; time tracking; reporting; calendar; discussions; file sharing; notes; lists and more.

I also absolutely loved the iPhone interface. Connecting what we do on our desktop computers or laptops to internet/web server functionality “in the cloud,” isn’t enough when we carry around devices like an iPhone and other small devices (like netbooks) that are growing in penetration.

Lately I’ve been discovering that I, and others with whom I interact, expect a native smartphone interface or at least markedly easier accessibility to functionality while mobile. OnePlace already delivers core functionality you’d need on the road with an iPhone.

While in the application, I wanted to change colors, add a logo and tweak other personalization settings, but Kickert is adamant that they’re going to keep key workflow aspects locked down while being flexible.

While I always want to personalize the heck out of anything I use online, Kickert pointed out that doing so makes it VERY challenging to perform support, train others on how to use it, and so forth. Having led small to large teams in the past online, I can tell you from personal experience how challenging it is to get some less-than-tech-savvy folks using a Web app because they just don’t “get” how it works. For this reason alone, I applaud this choice but do hope for a ‘pro’ account that lets me go wild with modifications (and yes, I’d train my own users!).

I’d encourage you to go to OnePlace and sign up for the free trial. You’ll undoubtedly see that it already has hit the sweet spot of what’s needed to collaborate with others. If you’re waiting until risk-becomes-reality and you or your company can’t go into the office and you need to collaborate virtually — or even if you figure you’ll just keep emailing around .doc’s and spreadsheets to those with whom you’re collaborating — OnePlace is an offering that is perfect for today’s increasingly mobile and always-on, always-connected workforce collaborating with one another online, as well as you if you’re really serious about getting the most out of the GTD system.

Tags: Features, LifeHacks, Reviews, Software //