Ditch Your Sticky Notes, Developers: Why You Need A Task Management Software

by Jonni G. Analyst

You are tired of seeing the desk board littered with colourful sticky notes, all of them titled with “TO DO”. This might work fine for your personal shopping list or your bucket list. But if you are planning your work that way, then it’s high time to wake up from that nightmare and ask yourself “Am I being efficient?”

Task management is a lot more than just a “TO DO LIST”, it can be used in various project development phases be it planning, developing, testing, maintenance, etc. For this sort of work, a mere list would not suffice. One needs a robust and efficient task management software that offers more enhanced features to tackle compelling issues in managing the day to day tasks.

Each project, regardless of how perplexing or how easy it is, can always be divided into tasks. When high levels of complexity are added to the tasks, task management software can help you coordinate and track team tasks and review the task schedules.

Why Developers need Task Management Software extensively?

Even though it is extremely energizing for a developer to begin taking a shot at new projects, there are numerous obstacles that the designers and the whole team have to overcome. As the project starts evolving, things can easily get out of hand. Rather than achieving the objectives, developers may get frustrated by the difficulties and eventually get demotivated. Developers who are aiming at ambitious projects need to focus on completing the project before the deadlines and that too with efficiency. To ensure that everything runs smoothly, they need a powerful and client friendly task management tool that can fragment the task into smaller chunks and enable the team to fill potential gaps.

Tasks are essential, however, more often than not they’re only little pieces of a bigger exertion. It’s essential to manage but it is more important to look for a task management software or tool that gives you a chance to accomplish other important things than just maintaining a list.

Managing your task online on a task management system, helps your team get a transparent view of your whole project. It helps you to spot errors and issues easily and organize your work according to importance and urgency.

Some of the most common problems that developers face in absence of a Task Management tool are:

1. Difficulties in remembering tasks:

Do tasks assigned to you go in one ear and out the other? Do your colleagues or your managers need to remind you about a particular task quite often?

It’s alright! Don’t panic, it happens. Many people experience serious difficulties remembering dates and critical data when they’re concentrating on some other crucial work or working under stringent timelines. In this situation, you have to look for a better approach to hold significant information on tasks you’ve been allocated.

2. Much of your time gets wasted digging up important emails:

Your inbox can get littered with important emails and some useless stuff which will make it difficult to segregate what’s needed and what’s not. Even if you try to filter them out by tagging or colour coding, it will only result in wastage of energy and time.

Features that you should look for when buying a task management system:

Choosing the right task tracking system that best fits your necessities requires some serious thought. This isn’t something you should shoot without aim. There are a ton of tools to browse in the market. Some are extremely basic while others offer an extensive variety of functionalities, providing enough features to fulfil the requirement of the most complex businesses.

You should keep in mind that the simplicity or complexity of a task management software doesn’t decide whether it’s a good fit for your business. Identify the goals i.e decide what you want your task management software to do for your business. So decide, do you need just a task app for your phone? Do you need a task list online? Or do you need a larger project management software that lets you manage your tasks with your team?

Here are a few basic features that your task management system should definitely offer:

1. Prioritize

After you make your rundown of undertakings, the next thing a task management software is supposed to do is prioritize them for you. Some actions may need immediate attention while others can wait. A few tasks should be completed before you can even move to the next one because there is a possibility of dependencies. The software should give you a glimpse of all your activities in one go. This can help you figure out where more time should be allotted so that you can deliver the project on time. The task management tool should allow for group activities so that work can be done at the same time. Additionally, it should also allow us to update these priorities, as they’re going to change in a project life cycle.

2. Online Task Management

With an online task management system on hand, you don’t need those sticky notes anymore, you will always remember your tasks. You don’t need to push your brain to remember who asked you what and when it has to be delivered.

When your task list is on the web, automated reminders are sent to you through emails in advance. You can change how often you want these reminders as per as your convenience.

3. Collaborate on tasks

When you are having multiple conversations online regarding some specific tasks it is important that the task management tool allows you to join important records, documents and even photographs and recordings related to that particular task. Rather than moving the discussion to another social chatting site, you and your group can now talk and share imperative information about the task.

4. Status

The moment you start a task, the software should offer you a real-time view of the status of your task, whether completed or in progress. It doesn’t matter if it’s done by a list or a colour coding. Also, it is preferable if your task management app uses Gantt chart to create a visual representation of the task progress.

5. Calendar

You should have a facility to add email notification to your calendar on the task management software. By doing this you are saving your time in designing a system that reminds you and your team about important timelines throughout your project life-cycle.

So here you have all the things that will help you and your team deliver the best result within stringent timelines, limited budgets and succeed on your next development cycle.

Source: https://softwarebuyersbog.blogspot.in/2018/03/developers-task-management-software.html