Task management: A foundation for project management.
Project management is all about planning, allocation of resources, scheduling, directing, monitoring, assessing, finding remedy for errors, and the final close up of the project. It includes tools, methodologies, processes etc. With progress in time online project management came into effect. The advantages were:
Storing projects on the internet.
Plan tasks, assign and distribute them and follow the progress.
Create and maintain database for all customers.
Access the project from any computer with internet connection.
Share the project with team members by giving them specific access rights.
This gave rise to many online project management tools being used, to increase productivity within a short period of time, effectively and efficiently. Some of the commonly used project management tools are as follows:
Smartsheet: introduced a spreadsheet. It offers file sharing, GANTT charts, and row-wise discussions.
Wrike: can create tasks from e-mails which are turned into nifty GANTT charts. It has a strong reporting skill that helps one to see how each team member is performing in various project tasks.
Liquid Planner: highlights about realistic estimation in which ranged estimates and statistically correct calculations are used for realistic schedules.
Zoho Project: has real-time chat tools and time tracking. It allows teams to track and report bugs.
Insightly: It has an address book function which adds new contacts from one’s email. They use advanced e-mail analytic tools to discover one’s contacts by analyzing the From, To, cc fields in one’s emails to know who knows who. This helps one in getting the project done by the right people.
Manymoon: integrates with Google documents and calendar. It lets one know what each team member is doing and has completed.
AtTask: evaluates each team member’s schedule. This helps in giving even tasks to all estimates the completion period.
TeamBox: is a socially savvy tool. It allows one to sign up and login with Facebook and Twitter. One can choose whether to make one’s project public or private and put it for one’s community or network to participate.
Agile Zen: It has a kanban board which has a number of columns. These columns represent phases which the work has to go through, in order to be complete.
Hyperoffice: allows easy storage and management of documents. It can do project management, business e-mailing, use as Sharepoint or Exchange alternative.
OfficeMedium: automatically creates an organized archive of the project whenever there is an event and an e-mail interaction with respect to that task. This helps in searching and filtering each member’s tasks. Thus tagging, tracking and organizing are a valuable resource for the project.
Managing a task through its life cycle which includes planning, testing, tracking and reporting is called task management. It helps an individual or group of individuals to share their knowledge in order to achieve a common goal. Task management also includes keeping track of the status of a project, time management, priority, allocating human and financial resources etc. It forms a part of project management and process management.
When a task is assessed one needs to determine the following:
Priority of the task
Deadline
Resources required
Delegations
Actions
Add the actions to one’s to-do list. Also add things you are waiting for such as a feedback or an e-mail. Then pick up the next task based on priority and resources.
Keep a track of the progress of your task. One can assess it only a daily or weekly basis. This helps in understanding what tasks are to be added, deleted or delegated. It also reflects what action has to be taken for the next day.
In order to have a smooth flow some points need to be kept in mind
Avoid multitasking
Process items on the desk and email and determine what actions are to be taken to remove them.
Review the to-do-list in order to determine if any tasks require immediate actions or if any tasks has been missed out.
New tasks keep adding on to the list, so one must try to accomplish as much as one can in order to deliver right.
Managing multiple teams and tasks require specialised task management tools which are available on the web. There are task management activities across various software products and services.
Thus the task management and project management tools serve as a foundation for efficient workflow in an organization.