Hello, everyone.
I am Sajjadur.
Today, I'm going to present our work on developing MixTAPE,
a mixed-initiative action plan creation
tool for team-based projects.
Time and again, checklists have proven
to save lives, prevent accidents, and help
projects ship on time.
As a result, software for creating checklists and action
plans has turned into a billion-dollar industry.
If checklists are so important, how should teams create them?
We conducted a needfinding study to understand
the process of plan creation for website design projects at B12.
We found that action plan creation is
a multi-step iterative process.
Project managers need to collect requirements, synthesize them
into action plans, and annotate the tasks
with owners and priorities.
Collaborators then iterate over the plan.
We observed challenges at every step of this workflow.
One of the challenges is to collect requirements
from stakeholders in a structured fashion.
Taking notes over phone calls or live conversations
was difficult without proper structure.
Once requirements are collected, project managers
need to synthesize information from multiple sources
into action plans.
However, sources like call notes and surveys
may contain conflicting information.
Moreover, the presentation of the combined plans
may vary across projects.
For example, plans were presented
as a list or paragraph.
Project managers then had to manually assign
tasks to different collaborators, which
was time-consuming.
The presentation and communication of task priority
was inconsistent across projects.
Some used the sorted list while others used colored or worded
text to convey priority.
This variation was confusing for other collaborators.
These challenges can be seen not only at B12,
but at many different places.
We developed MixTAPE to address these challenges.
MixTAPE features the semi-structured note pad
for ease of note-taking and an automated synthesizer
and annotator to reduce manual effort during plan synthesis.
In a mixed-initiative fashion, humans
review and curate mission-generated plans
and then collaborate.
Let's see how we do them on MixTAPE.
On the left, we see the client survey.
The customer mentioned that they want a single-page website
and it should have these six sections.
Now project managers take notes here
on the right in a structured notepad, which
contains specific sections related
to a website like structure, design content.
The note pad is also grouped with an auto-complete model
to assess during live note-taking.
For example, the project manager is adding
a task in the domain section.
Notes are added using a [INAUDIBLE] language like dash
for adding tasks and double-dash for adding note details.
When the project manager hits Convert, tasks in the notepad
are supplemented with tasks automatically generated
from client surveys.
For example, the first task shown here is from the notepad.
And the rest, are automatically generated from the survey.
Project managers can delete the duplicated tasks.
The tasks are automatically grouped into sections,
resulting in a structured presentation of action plans.
For example, tasks are added to sections
like domain and content.
Pretrained classifiers assign each task to a specific role.
For example, the first two tasks in the design section
were automatically assigned to a designer
and a third test was automatically
assigned to a customer.
As they follow the action plan and perform tasks,
collaborators can update the task state as pending,
completed, or declined.
So this is how MixTAPE is currently used at B12.
We evaluated MixTAPE on 32 website design projects
in B12 incorporated with the Google Docs
best approach used prior to launching MixTAPE.
We measured metrics like plan synthesis time and consistency
and quantity of tasks.
We also obtained qualitative feedback
from surveys and interviews.
Let's look at some of the results.
Project managers took almost nine minutes less
to synthesize action plans with MixTAPE than Google Docs.
At the same time, MixTAPE created more tasks
for designers, resulting in fewer client requirements being
missed.
Moreover, the tasks created were more consistent
across projects.
Finally, the designers were highly satisfied
with the quality of the action plans
and asked less clarification questions.
However, there's still room for improving MixTAPE.
The managers felt that the auto-suggest feature
was a distraction during live note-taking.
Both managers and designers asked
for more instantaneous communication channels
like slack integration.
Also, the action plans lacked proper [? project ?] management
when a project required multiple iterations.
So MixTAPE provides a single source of project planning
and collaboration which reduced manual effort via automation
but decision making was still up to humans.
While there's still room for improvement,
the initial results are very promising.
We urge you to read the paper for more details.
Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions
or suggestions.
I'm happy to answer your questions now.