Ok, after reading my last posting – I realized I really was on a rant! Then again, what do you expect when you post something in the middle of the night? I figure this is the beginning of a series of posts for me about shifting culture using SharePoint.
One of my pet peeves is lack of accountability. Far too often people are able to avoid responsibility by passing blame or hiding behind confusion. Often when a task requires multiple people in different steps, it’s very easy for someone to simply delay or not deliver their tasks on time thereby slowing down the entire process. Using the task list combined with workflows in SharePoint is very effective in addressing this. It provides the following features:
1 – Clear assignment of responsibilities
By using the task list, you can clearly assign tasks to team members. This creates a clear assignment of tasks with associated due dates. Combining this makes it very easy for team members to understand what their responsibilities are.
2 – Transparency
This provides a very transparent way to display responsibilities. Team members can all browse the team site tasks lists to see who has been assigned work. This also promotes a sense of fairness as if there is some biased way that work is being assigned, there is a record of it.
3 – Record keeping
As a project manager it’s difficult to keep track of what everyone is doing. by using the task list, as long as you remember to use it when you assign tasks, you will always have a record. This eliminates the human error factor of memory loss 
4 – Helping to teach time organization
Not everyone is great at prioritizing their work. I advise my teams to use the due dates of work as a way to determine what needs to be done first. I consider this to be passive reinforcement but it can be useful and perhaps less confrontational than showing someone exactly how to manage their time. Let’s not forget those pesky daily email reminders when your tasks are overdue. I prefer to let staff see those than have to constantly chase someone down.
5 – Supporting performance reviews
As a supervisor I am a firm believer in keeping track of your achievements and presenting them during performance reviews. By assigning all of my team’s tasks through a task list, they instantly have a record of everything they’ve achieved. This is great for helping team members do self assessments.
I could go on for days – but I love having a mechanism that keeps everyone on the same page.