So many tasks so little time

Lately,  I have had a lot of sites launch in a relatively short  time.  Whenever a deadline is near, no matter how ready you are, there is always that fast paced list of last-minute items to knock out.  I haven’t yet found the perfect method/tool to track tasks so I decided to put the question to my peers.

Every month we try to pose a question to our team of Project Managers to weigh in on.  This month?  Task Management.

What is your favorite task management method for internal and external teams?

This is either a difficult question or they are a long-winded group (maybe a little of both) below are some highlights from the replies I received.

Jeff Herron: I’ve tried many different task management tools and approaches. Each has their positive and negative qualities so, I am often using multiple approaches based on what is needed and what the client and project team prefers.

Ticket tracking tools are great and I think these have the most potential for being useful in the most varied situations. The key however is letting users make updates through email – being notified isn’t enough, that is a little harder to find.  A ticketing system, like OnTime,  provides a running history of the ticket, can be reassigned, status changed, prioritized, sorted and reported on as it is designed to manage all aspects of the ticket’s life. This makes it terrific for managing development, production or QA tasks where a ticket rarely goes from open to closed but rather moves back and forth in many different states.

For the less technical part of a project, tasks are rarely so discrete and are often much more ambiguous. For these tasks, a simple task management tool that allows you to assign tasks, track due dates, some idea of priority and keep notes about it is often enough. This is what we use in Central Desktop. This type of tracker amounts to a macro level to-do list for key project players and is often easily understand and grasped by all types of clients and project teams.

Jennifer Bagnell Stuart: my approach definitely falls under the “whatever works” category. For nearly every project I create a project plan that maps out the phases, tasks, durations, due dates, task owners and includes a gantt chart of the timeline. This is good for planning purposes, but does not serve well for task assignments and management.

Central Desktop has a task management feature that’s pretty nifty…You can assign a task to anyone in the workspace regardless of which organization they’re in, you can copy multiple people on the task who need to be kept in the loop, you can assign priority and due dates, change status, add detail and comments. …Generally speaking, though, client adoption of Central Desktop has been much more successful than OnTime because it does one thing really well: it integrates with email by allowing you to send and reply to file uploads and discussion posts entirely through email without ever having to actually open and log-in to Central Desktop in your browser. In other words, it meets the client where they are — in their Outlook inbox or reading email on their mobile device — and doesn’t require them to adopt new practices.

Andy Dimock: For simpler tasks I have historically relied on email and verbal assignments and check-ins. While this is also unwieldy, it is within the context of the rest of our daily work and interactions, so it is almost always effective. I have recently started trying to get my internal teams to use Outlook tasks which are simple, easy to view, assign, and track. They are also within the context of something we are using all day already (Outlook). It is too early for me to comment on its efficacy, but I am hoping that it is at least a reasonable supplement to the other methods.

For external teams, it varies from one client / vendor to another. For some, CentralDesktop tasks have worked very well. For others, they are very email focused. The most consistent process that I have used involves a PM trinity – weekly updated project plan,  status report, and an email summary of upcoming tasks over the next several weeks. That level of redundancy requires some extra time and effort, but it is virtually guaranteed to work. Ultimately, making sure nothing slips through the cracks is worth the investment – as two old proverbs go, “a stitch in time saves nine” and “penny wise and pound foolish.”

Amanda O’Malley: …In the past I have used Basecamp for task management with the client.  While I don’t think it is nearly robust enough for internal task management, it worked well for clients who were comfortable enough to use it.  For most clients though I think the status reports are the most important thing for keeping them up to date….I  have also used Google spreadsheets in the past to track tasks for certain clients who were more comfortable with that.

As for internal task management…Previously, I had been using an online tool called Intervals that served the same purpose as OnTime, but was also useful for less granular tasks, so everything was all in one place for the internal team (including tracking personal tasks and time allowances).  Wireframe or design work could be assigned and given certain sorting criteria and tech tasks/bugs could be assigned with different sorting criteria.  I could filter all the tasks by project, client, user, task type, phase, etc., etc.  and also attach things (the wireframes, design drafts etc) and discuss them in the task….

So where does that leave us?

I think Andy said it best “I have yet to find a magic process that works for internal and external task management, or even consistently across internal teams or broader groups for that matter”.

Do you agree? disagree? What task management tools have you had the most success with?

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