3 Effective Ways of Open Source Task Management

Task Management has come a long way since the days of simple to do lists, excel sheets and notepad checklists.

As teams continue to deliver their best work and move their organizations to the top in their segments, they increasingly rely on highly visual work management processes and tools.

Being effective, productive and highly efficient is a must have and non-negotiable.

It it difficult to survive without being at least one or all of the above.

Project Management tools with highly robust and interactive task management come to our rescue.

But! But!

There are tons of enterprise project management software to pick from. Plus we have teams that are highly integrated yet unique in the work they do. So one size or work management type doesn’t help.

Enterprises have a mix of produce development, engineering, customer support, marketing, sales, HR teams and more.

Each of them has their unique style of working and project requirements to get their work accomplished.

All of these add quite a load on enterprises to ensure all of its employees have the right productivity tools they need to perform their best.

Quiet complex isn’t it and do add the cost factor into the above mix.

Few Must haves for Task Management Tools

First and foremost an enterprise collaboration software  must accommodate specific needs of the team and scale with the team.

And as we know from experience enterprise project management must be supported by

• Well defined task management system
• Tasks with clear assignments, due dates, estimated hours
• Time tracking for transparent planned vs actual hours
• Highlight overdue tasks
• Allow for custom task types and tagging for better task classification
• Ability to setup custom task reminders
• Resource availability, resource utilization and leave plans for improved task allocation
• Send out alerts and notifications upon task progress, status updates and more
• Holistic reports around task trends w.r.t resolution, priority, age etc.
• Gantt Charts, Kanban and Scrum boards

So look for a tool that provides all of the above and all or any combination of the below task management styles.

Gantt Charts, Kanban Boards & Scrum Boards are the need of the day.

Each of these has their own purpose and value that they bring to the operational excellence table.

Gantt Charts

Gantt chart is a great project scheduling tool.

They clearly help align the team w.r.t the project’s timelines and delivery dates with all interlinking displayed on a single chart.

Gantt Charts are visual, instantly show when tasks are due and how changes to the tasks reflect upon their dependent tasks.

All the more crucial for complex and large projects involving multiple teams.

Basically, they help identify possible delays and enable proactive measures in a timely manner.

To summarize Gantt Charts offer:

• Visual project and task planning
• Straight forward scheduling
• Well-defined task inter-dependencies and task linking
• Teams know how the status of their task queue impacts the overall project and its outcome
• Track your team member and know who is doing what and whom to connect when needed

Gantt Charts are a must for enterprise program managers, project managers, team managers, PMO and of course the clients to get a good hang of the project progress, issues and associated delays so that they know when to step in.

Kanban Boards

Kanban boards are highly intuitive and interactive. One look is all you need to know the true state of affairs.

Inspired by Toyota’s total quality management, it helps maintain clarity around task assignments and task status.

Smart enterprise project management teams build custom swim lanes keeping in mind the resources that would need to step up for a specific part of the task life-cycle.

Thus, it helps to keep the momentum going and get tasks completed faster. Team members are more aligned with the end goals and are perfectly aware of the impact of their work.

• Highly effective tool for daily team meetings
• Custom task status swim lanes help identify true progress instantly
• Interactive board for quick update & monitoring
• Meaningful status classification based on your project types
• Freedom from manual and time consuming status reports
• Enables productivity and allows to focus on crucial items first

Kanban Boards are highly beneficial for marketing teams to plan their content calendars, event planning and managing campaigns. And also for the manufacturing teams to stay in control of their manufacturing stages and workflow.

Scrum Board

Agile project management is a highly optimized project management methodology.

You get to manage your product wish list a.k.a product backlog items (PBI), prioritize features you want to build first, plan your sprints and setup estimations accordingly.

The best part is you move from guesstimates to accurate estimation as your team’s confidence grows and they know how much they can achieve in specified times.

Sprint reports and Velocity charts help with monitoring commitment vs achieved to enable teams identify things they missed, over or under estimated and get better at planning for future releases.

It is all about self-organizing your work. Something that enterprise project management teams strive to achieve day in and out across the globe!

• To-do, In Progress, Done – As simple as that!
• Enables faster agile adoption
• Reduces the scrum team’s distraction
• Increased collaboration as all are focused on the key deliverables of the sprint
• Helps define or lock your task list for the specified duration
• Precision focus on delivering with quality

Scrum boards are must for engineering teams, product development and software development teams.

So the smart thing to do is identify a tool that caters to all 3 task management styles for all your teams.

Orangescrum is just not one of them, but does it the best with its

• Easy to adopt UI
• Seamless transition or adoption to either of the above task management modes based on your project’s requirements.
• Custom task types, labels/tags, task reminders & task linking
• Extensive task reporting. sprint reports, velocity chart, resolution trend, ageing reports to name a few.
• In built chat app
• Custom user roles (RBAC)
• Native iOS & android app for mobile project management

And yes, your journey to being highly productive and successful at your work starts with quick guided tour and personalized use case reviews of your specific teams.