Entering the Age of Smart Project Management

The Redbooth Engineering team is excited to announce a series of new features in the ‘Smart Redbooth’ category to help teams better manage their projects from start to finish.

Smart Redbooth is a collection of features powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) using historical task data to help plan, follow, and complete their projects.  This level of personalization is the most important way to make project management ‘smarter’ and we started by including Smart features into the most popular action in Redbooth: creating a task.

The Smart Start

Last month we quietly released User Recommendations, a Smart feature which helps teams assign the most appropriate users for a task. Appearing in the Task Detail and in the user popover in your workspace, early users of the feature were pleased with the accuracy, ease of use, and time saving benefits of recommended users when creating a task.

This week we are releasing Due Date Recommendations, which predicts when a task will be completed based on the history of similar tasks. Alongside this recommendation are two common due dates, tomorrow and in 1 week.

In just 2 seconds, a task can be assigned and dated with the most relevant users and estimated due date. This is a big improvement for teams that create lots of tasks, and will save time during task creation over the life of the project. How do we plan to do that? Efficiency.

Goals of Smart Redbooth

While projects and management styles vary widely, we believe that efficiency is the secret to a well-run project. To help understand how teams can increase their efficiency, we created a formula to guide our Smart Redbooth features roadmap

Organization + accuracy = efficiency

Organization and accuracy have huge implications in project management, and a lack of either will drastically impact the results. When coming up with projects for Smart Redbooth and to tackle the biggest challenges first, we started with a focus on accuracy. It is more difficult to change than organization, and the most appropriate to benefit from AI.

Inspiration for Project Accuracy

A majority of people struggle to accurately estimate the completion time of a given task. This is famously encapsulated in Hofstadter’s Law, and common formulas such as “take your original estimate, then increase the value by one, and the unit by one”, wherein an overly optimistic “2 hours” becomes a sober “3 days”.

Over the years, Redbooth users have created nearly 30 million tasks and 2 million projects. It was natural for us to wonder whether we could extract useful patterns from this vast amount of data and use this insight to help our users make better predictions.

Given the recent advances in the field of Machine Learning through the use of deep neural networks, and the availability of powerful frameworks to explore this vast design space, we decided to experiment with this approach. Although it is still early days, we have already achieved some encouraging results and we look forward to continuously improving the quality of Smart Redbooth predictions.

Available Now

AI-powered Smart Redbooth features are available for all Business and 14 day Business preview customers. We’re excited for you to try it out, and to provide feedback about your experience. If you don’t have a Redbooth account, sign up for free at www.redbooth.com.