The Wake Forest Law Review is a student-run organization that publishes articles, notes, comments, and empirical legal studies. A satisfied user of Assembla, the Managing Editor Adam Burks provided us with the following feedback to share with you. While software development teams are our core customer base, Adam explains that virtually any team can benefit from Assembla's SaaS tools that help teams improve efficiency, task tracking, and communication. We thank him for the glowing review.
As an academic journal, my organization falls outside the software development framework in which Assembla specializes. However, despite its technical foundation, Assembla shows great promise to many nontraditional organizations that have routines, deadlines, staff-member-specific tasks, and oversight requirements. In our case, Assembla has helped the Wake Forest University Law Review move from paper trails and email chains to a coherent, centralized task management system.
The Law Review’s old system worked, but we saw room for improvement. We never had huge problems with getting our issues edited and ready for publication, but, in retrospect, using Assembla has emphasized the fundamental inefficiency in the way we did business. Our business is taking an author’s article through the editorial process, which entails five rounds of editing by different teams. Before, when I had to give assignments or the staff submitted their work, I only used email. Unfortunately, because most of the assignments were pieces of a single article, managing each staff member’s submission was piecemeal and disorganized. Furthermore, the stages of an article’s development were kept in folders and files with different names to keep track of which stage the file corresponded. We kept these files in different folders in a tree with many, many branches. In short, the managing editor had to spend a lot of time keeping the pieces together and organized, and the risk of human error for replacing or deleting a needed file was nontrivial.
However, over the past year, using Assembla has transformed our management process. Now, instead of emailing out assignments, I can create a ticket for each staff member. Each staff member has a membership to our Assembla spaces (these spaces correspond with each issue of our journal, which is a handy way to keep files and content discrete and organized). Now, they can find their assignments and then upload their completed work.
Assembla also does a great job of monitoring team activities, which is especially important to me given our hard deadlines and my duty to enforce them - every time someone is late turning something in, it causes the entire editorial process to be pushed back. Assembla lets me know who has submitted their final product and when it was submitted, in case I need to contact that individual to find out why his or her work is late. Not the most pleasant task, but an important one nonetheless.
As suggested by the image below, we have multiple articles and issues at different stages in the editorial process at any one time. In the past, determining when assignments were due and who had submitted what and when took considerable time and coordination. For a law student who already has a sizeable docket of school and clinic work, this overhead cost of management was very taxing. But now, with Assembla I can create the assignments, create the deadlines, and monitor workflow without having to do any read work. All I have to do is check the website, which saves considerable time and effort.
What I cannot emphasize enough is how great the Assembla website works with SVN repositories for keeping track of what stage of the process each article is in. Instead of having multiple copies of an article, each with a different name to indicate its step in the process, all I need is one folder with one file. I can use TortoiseSVN to check the change log and even compare the latest version with an earlier version to see if something was changed when it should not have been. Assembla and SVN have really cut down the clutter.
Initially, the staff was uncertain about Assembla’s usefulness because of the small technical learning curve, but after they had a couple opportunities to use the software they became fans. I sent around a survey to get feedback, and I got the impression that having all of their assignments and materials in a single location on Assembla was convenient and helpful in organizing their workflow. While I have been very impressed with Assembla from the beginning, the true test of Assembla’s effectiveness was in the staff’s positive responses.
Despite our “off-label” use of Assembla to support the editorial process of an academic journal, Assembla has been a great tool making our work easier and more organized.