Task Management

Rapid entry action items to support tasks and task-pools

Introduction

In a survey carried out by Tata Consultancy Services www.tcs.com (11 Dec
2007) it was found that 62% of IT projects had time overruns. Task management is the key element in managing schedules and is one of the more critical and time-consuming aspects of project management. Depending on the complexity of the project, managers and staff can often spend significant time estimating and re-estimating tasks, allocating staff and managing workloads. Spending disproportionate amounts of time on task and schedule management can narrow the overall focus of the project, and other parts of the project, such as deliverables, budgets and risk, can suffer through inadequate attention.

The conventional approach to task management is that all tasks and sub-tasks, such as displayed in a standard Gantt chart, must have people and time allocated to them. Some projects will have hundreds, if not thousands, of tasks all of which require active management. This can quickly develop into micro-management with small, but key pieces of work having to be specified as a task. An immediate effect of this approach is that reports and timesheets can become clogged with too much detail, and project and programme managers are faced with assimilating too much information.

Projects need tasks; that’s a given. But is there a way to capture all the necessary information while reducing the management and administrative overheads within projects? We believe there is.

Tasks

The new task (and task pool) management feature in i-lign allows:

Tasks to be specified and resources assigned to those tasks, as per normal. Planned and actual time will be tracked against these tasks and will feature in reporting and timesheets.
These tasks can be:

• Effort-driven: these tasks have defined start dates, and end dates that are set based on the number of people assigned, and their levels of allocated effort. This means the more people assigned to a task the sooner the task will be delivered, depending on the amount of time each individual is able to commit.
• Duration driven: these tasks have both start and end dates defined; the duration is fixed. This means that, irrespective of the number of people working on the task and the amount of time they are able to allocate to the task, the duration will always stay the same. If you apply a single resource to a duration-driven task then the overall effort will reflect the time that one person is able to commit to the task. If you assign another ten people the overall effort will rise to take into account that you now have eleven people working on the task, but the duration will stay fixed.

A task-pool is a specialised form of task unique to i-lign, specially adapted to allow recording of business as usual and management activities that are not easily handled within the conventional task framework, but which have to be allocated time. It allows users to allocate a block of time, which can be varied week by week, to overhead work or other small tasks. This time is taken into account when i-lign calculates resource allocations, and it can be reported on for time allocation purposes and costed and included in project and team budgets.

Action Items - The new feature

At this point the conventional approach would be to define a whole layer of tasks and sub-tasks, which would also feature in reporting and timesheets. We propose replacing these sub-tasks with simple, rapid-entry action items.

Action items:

• Are check-lists of work sitting under high-level tasks,
• Will be accessible through a person’s homepage and can be checked off once completed.
• Can be specified against any task and assigned to the people that have been assigned to that task. A person must be assigned to the project to be assigned to both tasks and action items.
• Can be estimated. The total time assigned against the list of action items can be promoted to the parent-task as a starting point for the overall effort required in the high-level task.
• Do not feature in reports or timesheets.

In effect, action items are minimalist sub-tasks without the full management overhead. They are designed to allow rapid allocation and management of work. This approach also means that only the significant tasks will appear in the task lists and Gantt chart, and will populate related reports. Programme managers will concentrate on the high-level tasks, and the detailed action items will only be seen by the project manager and the people involved in delivering those action items.