Once you have decided to enhance your business through integration, it is time to decide on what systems to integrate with. To make a well-grounded choice you can start with writing user stories, that illustrate how those integrations will be useful for your clients or partners.
task integration If you provide any sort of business services or just work closely with clients that use different collaborative software, you should consider integration with the latter as probably the best option to bridge the gap between your and your partner’s management systems and make them work in unity.
As to business applications, integration with task management platforms can make them more usable and convenient for a wider segment of both existing and potential clients that use different task software. For such purpose, integration with popular and well-proven platforms is more preferable, as their numerous users become your potential clients.
Writing user stories for integration is a great practice, as it helps to clarify what integration is needed and who benefits from it. User story is a one-sentence description of the requirement, which expresses the need of a user of the particular system. To help you make a more overarching integration plan we offer you to use two approaches.
#1 : User Persona
Start with writing user stories. Make a clear image of the collaborative experience that particular integration will bring to your customers. Don’t think about technical side or your benefits, focus on identifying the user value that this integration will generate, because your aim is seamless collaboration and integration is just a means for it
Mike Cohn in his book “User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development” offers a great and simple template of a user story:
“As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>.”
Examples:
As a user, I want to add issues and tasks from my CRM to TM platform and vice versa
As a user, I want some of my project and task data synchronized with those of my partners
As a user, I want my tasks from Asana synchronized with my personal to-do list
Writing such user stories helps to prioritize the integration tasks, as they vividly show the user value from each integration.
#2: System Persona
After you have defined your user stories, it is time to take care of the technical side. A system’s standpoint also has to be considered as there may be some important inside-integration tasks that don’t directly involve users. There are also many vital aspects that users don’t usually think about, such as:
– good system’s performance and flawless data interflow;
– making the system more convenient for developers, so that they could operate it faster and more efficiently;
– strong security;
– analytics and metrics for long-term planning.
Though these technical stories still have to contribute to the usability of the system, there have to be some user value, even if not always obvious or direct.
When you have decided what integrations your system needs, it is time to look for means of integration. It is a difficult, long and costly process that requires a service of a professional developer. It usually takes no less than a month just to establish the connection with one system, which will cost you no less than a few thousands of dollars.
Luckily, there is a solution for much easier multiple integrations. API2Task provides a unified API that allows data interaction with the majority of popular management platforms, including Trello, Asana, Jira, Basecamp,and others. The only thing you have to do is to develop one integration with this service, instead of long and complicated integrations with each of the systems separately.
If you are interested in this one-to-many API, schedule a call with our expert, who will provide you with all possible use cases, technical details, and answer any questions.