Define Timelines for Tasks and Employees
Task management is the process of managing a task through its lifecycle. It involves the planning, estimation and scheduling of the task as well as the ability to track dependencies and milestones. This section explains what task management is, and what features you should look for in a task management tool.
What is Task Management Software?
Task management software is used to manage your tasks, help with the estimation and scheduling, track dependencies, resources and milestones and help you make decisions when changes in priority are needed. From managing simple to-do lists to helping teams work and collaborate better, there are many different types of task management software and it is important to understand what your needs are to make sure you truly get a tool that is going to improve your productivity rather than create more work that it saves!
Task Management Software
With the move to agile methodologies and geographically distributed teams, the traditional ways of managing projects (GANTT project plans, whiteboards and yellow post-it notes) are no longer able to provide the real-time visibility needed in such demanding project schedules. A modern task management system should provide the following types of feature:
Now, not every tool provides all these features and you may not even need many of these features. So you should understand what are the real problems you are trying to solve, for example:
- You are an independent consultant, looking for a tool to help you manage your to-do lists, provide visibility to your clients and have some basic calendar and communication tools.
- You are managing the tasks of a small/medium-sized team that is physically co-located and need a way to manage the flow and assignment of activities.
- You are responsible for a large cross-functional department with 1,000 people scattered over multiple geographies and you need to manage your workload and collaborate in a globally distributed manner.
In each of these three examples the needs are quite different and a software tool that is optimal for one use case may be insufficient or conversely too cumbersome for the others.
Features of Task Management Software
The following features should be part of any task management system
- Develop high-level requirements with initial estimates
- Create notional project schedule with major releases
- Prioritize and schedule requirements for each release
- Determine resourcing levels to deliver required features
- Assign requirements, tasks and incidents using Agile planning board
- Refine project schedule to include release iterations
- Allocate requirements to iterations based on detailed task estimates
- Load-balance project resources to maximize project velocity
- Users enter project issues and defects during lifecycle
- Track issues and defects against project schedule
- View project velocity, burndown and burnup reports
- Customizable dashboards of key project information
Why Choose Digitech for Task Management
Digitech provides the ability to create, edit, assign and track the project tasks that have been assigned to members of the project team. You can search, filter and sort the list of tasks to quickly find those that are behind schedule or are late starting. In addition, Digitech provides the ability for team members to enter actual hours as the work on the project and compare them against the original estimates to ensure that the project can be delivered on-time, on-budget. Instead of having to buy separate requirements management, project planning and defect tracking tools, Digitech provides a complete web-based task management system in one package.