A company I worked at used a home-rolled task tracker. It had data modeling for a Job to be done, and within it a series of Steps that had to be done in order.

A company I worked at used a home-rolled task tracker. It had data modeling for a Job to be done, and within it a series of Steps that had to be done in order. Users could select the steps they wished to view from a big list, and be presented with the work items in that queue sorted by date. That was it. This task tracker worked fine for a period of time, until the list of Jobs exploded. The company added dozens of different types of tasks people could do, correlating to different products that had different delivery dates. Every person in the department had to be aware of every kind of sub-task they would be responsible for, and they had to manually subscribe to that sub-task or work would get lost. People spent a large amount of time every day selecting and un-selecting tasks just so they could view a focused list of todos, especially anyone in a shared role like Admins, or Lead Designer (who would also complete Design QA steps for other designers). Having to do this multiple times a day really irritated me. I didn't have access to the codebase and management wasn't whitelisting any extra development, so I hacked around the problem. I discovered that sub-task subscriptions were stored in a cookie on the users' machine, so I built a JS Bookmarklet that would read your cookie and help you create a new bookmarklet you could save to your bookmarks bar. This new bookmarklet would automatically navigate you to the task tracker, switch out your list of subscribed sub-tasks, and reload the page. I made a simple HTML help page instructing users how to use the tool, and I provided a basic set of pre-baked bookmarklets to get people started. Simple stuff like, "Website Development Approvals" or "Templates Ready for Build" or "Work Order ready for Design". This automation _exploded_. I instantly saved 20 minutes a day across 20+ people. But more importantly, this simple bit of code introduced and formalized the idea of a "Role Queue" at the company. Business Admins had confidence they weren't missing work items, because they all collaborated on maintaining an authoritative set of bookmarklets for their work. Same for Designers, QA, Developers, etc. This in turn changed how the departments were run. People could work off the "same" queues, tag team work, and make group decisions on priority. Where before everyone saw a slightly different lists of work and felt different levels of stress, now there was consensus between coworkers. I saved thousands of man-hours, and really smoothed out the path to production for a new product, all because at its core, I resented having to do such a stupid task like "just click these boxes and uncheck these and save" just to go from viewing "Ad buildout" to "Website buildout" Funny thing, the company is still using my bookmarklet code. Every now and then I get a text from an old friend or two working there laughing about the code comments I put into my core bookmarklet builder. /** * BetterQueues by Titus Johnson * This is hack to make it easier to view work queues * If you're reading this and this code is still in use, you need to get a better job */