Enabling team collaboration with task management tools

Project and task management tools aim to support remote or face-to-face collaboration. Despite the growing needs for these tools, little is known about how they are utilized in practice. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study using UpWave, a task management tool, and the ways that it enables team collaboration. The group interviewees utilize UpWave for their collaborations and report on its features in terms of use, best practices, motivations and rewards for users to encourage their collaboration. This paper concludes that project and task management tools offer new possibilities for collaborations; it also makes suggestions for using such tools in teams. This study's future work will include a mixed-methods approach to gain a greater understanding of the tools' effects in various collaboration settings.