“You Can Get Productive with MeisterTask in Six Hours.”

Productivity is a paradox: a worker is only as good as their tools, but a tool is only as good as the person behind the keyboard. That’s where Cathy Fanning and her IT training company – The Temporary Alternative – provide unique value on the Australian market. With a focus on maximizing efficiency with Microsoft Office and 365, upskilling is the name of the game.

As a Meister Partner, Cathy’s team also helps customers create efficient, sustainable processes with task management software. From smaller businesses (ten to twenty employees) to larger corporations with hundreds of staff members, there are many roads to success. However, there’s one tool that has been at the heart of the journey: MeisterTask.

As a seasoned technology expert, Cathy Fanning has a sharper eye than most when it comes to spotting value in productivity software. While MeisterTask wasn’t the first task management tool that the team at The Temporary Alternative tried, it was certainly the one that stuck.

Cathy’s enthusiasm for MeisterTask led to The Temporary Alternative becoming part of the Meister Partner Program in 2020. Since then, there has been a twin-pronged approach to using the tool: to organize projects and day-to-day work for the internal team, and to recommend MeisterTask to clients. 

However, as The Temporary Alternative grew to cater for more clients with ever more complex needs, Cathy soon realized that her approach to training customers demanded a radically different approach. To ensure long-term success, there was a pressing need to streamline, and for The Temporary Alternative to practice what they preach – efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.

With the stakes high, the need for a fast, repeatable process was obvious – a way to eliminate unproductive time and to reach more customers, more effectively, with fewer delays. Fortunately, the key to improving training processes was already at hand. With MeisterTask’s project templates, Cathy had access to the tool that would turn The Temporary Alternative into a well-oiled productivity machine.

Using her expert knowledge of MeisterTask, Cathy focused on removing friction from key areas of the client training process: duplicate work, the extremely diverse needs of her client base, and the potential for scheduling clashes.The solution was to create a MeisterTask template that covered each stage of the customer training process: from timeline management, to the onboarding of new companies, to post-training, project management rollouts.

From this basis, Cathy and the team can adjust and personalize the tailor-made training program according to the individual project requirements, software platform and client wishes. Each project section is split into detailed tasks, with tags used to indicate priority, group similar types of tasks contextually, and to give at-a-glance information to keep her team on the same page. When the template becomes an active project, more specific details – such as assignees, due dates and the like – can be added to make the roles and responsibilities of team members 100% transparent.

A more consistent approach to training schedules has various benefits for The Temporary Alternative: whether in training teams to use MeisterTask or any other type of software. Naturally, the automated structure of the project saves time when it comes to project setup. However, the clear distinction between pre-training, live-training and post-training stages ensures that important information doesn’t slip through the cracks: during the preparations, the sessions themselves, or the aftercare process.

However, Cathy has found that the flexibility of MeisterTask has been equally valuable as its consistency. The diversity of the company’s clients – who range from tech-savvy administrators to beginner-level staff – make the ability to adapt the project schedule, and to communicate those changes effectively, priceless.

For Cathy Fanning, life is easier now. The introduction of the training project template has created a process that is defined by its efficiency: fewer meetings, fewer emails, and more peace of mind. Likewise, using MeisterTask on a daily basis has led to significant improvements in communication: inside the team and with external stakeholders. With clients often in different timezones, the value of asynchronous communication is enormous to Cathy.

With a tool for organizing training projects in place, The Temporary Alternative has been able to continue its important work – providing dynamic, effective software training that upskills teams – in an efficient, time saving way. In fact, the process is so streamlined that new clients are being onboarded to MeisterTask in record time.