What Is Task Management? — Learn How Tasks Are Used Effectively In Projects

Every project starts with a single task. And since we’ve all turned into project managers nowadays, it’s important to understand how tasks and projects work together to drive your team and your company towards success.

In this guide, we’ll explain crucial task management concepts — from task management skills and methods, to the best task management software you can use.

By the time you finish reading this, task and project management will have gone from a headache to a piece of cake.

So let’s make your project a success!

What Is Task Management?

Task management is a way of breaking up the entire project into a series of tasks that need to get done.

So let’s say your team is working on a project: reaching a thousand sales by the end of 2019.

Task management helps you define the tasks that are going to help you achieve your goal. It answers the question of:

Who needs to do what in order for us to achieve our goal and finish our project?

Of course, there are different kinds of projects, but the ones we work with in our companies are typically as simple as this. Our team needs to get it done, and tasks will help us get there.

However, just because task management sounds simple, it doesn’t mean it is.

Fortunately, there are proven methods that you can use to make task management the main fuel behind your project’s success.

The Importance of Team Task Management

You may be wondering why we even need team task management tools, and collaborative task management as a concept.

We don’t have to look further from Facebook statistics: 70% of users spend time on the app every day, due to procrastination. So even on a micro-scale, where we manage our own daily tasks, we don’t excel at it.

And if we, as teams, don’t excel at tasks management, here’s what happens:

• The right people don’t get the right things done
• Other team members suffer the consequences
• There’s a lot of confusion
• And the project doesn’t get done in time

Due to all of these causes (and more), we need collaborative task management.

It’s no longer enough for managers to manage projects and leave everything else up to their staff. Instead, we should focus on facilitating transparency in the process, as the whole team depends on its members.

How Do We Manage Tasks within Teams?

While project managers may focus on the details and use fancy terminology, that’s not our goal.

Our goal is getting stuff done (and usually, our task management tool of choice is Microsoft Office 365), and here’s how we manage tasks:

• Structure the project (including resources, key outcomes, and a timeframe).
• Break the project into milestones.
• Divide each milestone into key tasks (the smaller the better).
• Delegate and assign tasks, provide necessary resources, and set deadlines.
• Monitor execution and provide help or make adjustments (if necessary).

This may be the structure of task management, but it’s also important to visualize this task to project completed progress.

Visual Task Management Methods

A simple, yellow post-it to-do list works for task management. But it typically works best for day-to-day personal task management, where everything on the list are things like walking the dog and picking up our kids from extracurricular activities.

When we have to perform team task management, there are a lot of people included in the process, a lot of tasks, and a project that needs to be monitored in order for it to progress.

Gantt Charts for Task Management

Most project managers use Gantt charts for this. It’s simple and it illustrates project progress according to tasks and milestones which have been completed.

Originally published at https://www.projectcentral.com.