Flexible Task Management Support for Knowledge-Intensive Processes

Knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) are driven by knowledge workers utilizing their skills, experiences and expertise. As KiPs are emergent and unpredictable by nature, their operational support is challenging. For coordinating and synchronizing their work, usually, knowledge workers rely on simple task lists like to-do lists or checklists. Though these instruments are intuitive and prevalent, their current implementations tend to be ineffective and error-prone. Tasks are neither made explicit nor are they synchronized. In addition, no task lifecycle support is provided and media disruptions aggravate task management. As a consequence, the efforts knowledge workers spent in task management are not exploited for optimizing future KiPs. This work presents the proCollab approach, focusing on its stateful and customizable components of processes, task trees, and tasks. proCollab processes may constitute KiPs in the shape of projects and cases, while generic task trees and tasks support required digital task lists of any kind. To enable domain-specific task support, the proCollab state management allows to integrate domain-specific procedure models (e.g., Scrum) and to enrich proCollab components with customized states. Finally, this customizable task management support fosters knowledge workers' coordination, increases work awareness, reduces media disruptions, and enables the reuse of valuable coordination efforts and knowledge.