Projects deliver products or services. Products and services are further broken down to deliverables that teams are responsible for. To plan, execute, and track these deliverables, it is imperative that specific tasks are identified for each of the deliverable and ownership assigned to specific team members. It is in this context organizations must carefully choose a robust Project Task Management Software.
Task management addresses the end-to-end life cycle of projects from initiation, to planning, execution, and finally to closure, cutting across the different dimensions of project management – scope, resources, costs, quality, risks, communication, procurement, and integration. Task management operates at the core of schedule management. It enables teams achieve the project goals by collaboration, and knowledge sharing. Tasks are also differentiated by complexity from low to high.
How to manage tasks effectively?
TouchBase- a complete Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) for business of all sizes provides a comprehensive solution for task management. It can be easily configured to the needs of your industry and your organizational standards, be it –
- Professional services
- Life sciences and pharmaceuticals
- Engineering and manufacturing
- EPC (Engineering Procurement & Construction)
- FMCG
- Consumer durables and…
- Others
TouchBase is currently used by 40+ customers globally.
Why choose TouchBase?
TouchBase has a wide-ranging and a comprehensive task management suite to accomplish tasks involved throughout project lifecycle and not limited to:
- Managing proposals
- Creating business case
- Requirements gathering
- Schedule management
- Resource management
- Timesheets and expense management
- Cost management
- Procurement management
- Risk management
- Documentation
- Defects management, technical reviews
- Other administrative activities
Managing Proposals:
There are six key elements required for well-constructed project proposal.
- Executive summary – summarizes the gist of the proposal and its value
- History – an outline of successful past projects
- Requirements – items, materials and resources needed for the project
- Solution – describes the approach to solve a business problem
- Authorization – stakeholders signoff
- References and appendices
TouchBase allows you to plan your proposals and team members could update tasks to indicate the extent of completion status, allowing you to organize your proposal section by creating a breakdown of work or WBS. .
Creating Business Case:
Business case outlines the fundamental reason for an organization to engage in a project. Business case development typically includes gathering a broad set of information about the project, , intended benefits to the organization, preliminary assumptions & risks, and finally, justification & recommendation to go ahead with the project. The format of a business case includes:
- Executive summary
- The business problem
- The proposed solution (Project definition)
- Resources and investment
- Expected benefits and returns (financial and otherwise)
- High-level timelines
- Organization structure
With TouchBase, teams can quickly start building business cases through a series of tasks that are assigned to team members. Being a completely web-based solution, TouchBase offers a great platform for real-time collaboration along with its easy-to-configure business processes, templates, and checklists.
Requirements management:
In our real-world projects, we deal with too many of those “he said, she said” situations where deformed or unclear requirements end up negatively impacting our projects and tarnishing business relationships.
Main functions of a requirements management software include:
- Single point of reference to document a project requirement and implementation
- Blueprint for stakeholders to understand project deliverable.
TouchBase requirements management software helps to log all requirements for your project or product and organize into a hierarchy which can be released using workflow. Based on the prioritized workflow, project team works to deliver the requirements. Being an enterprise-wide solution, TouchBase also integrate to other modules of resources and schedule management.
Schedule management:
Irrespective of any tool we decide to use, prepare schedule in the following way:
- Identify available time, start by establishing time you want to make available for work
- Schedule essential actions
- Schedule high priority tasks
- Plan contingency time
Inputs for schedule development is from multiple teams/resources, TouchBase helps to collaborate all activities with team members and track their progress, its integrated schedule management module (PPM) can create a project schedule with numerous inputs.
Resource Management:
For effective management of resources, we need to:
- Understand the demand.
- Assess the existing capacity.
- Assign people based on the demand and capacity available.
- Track utilization and update the assignments.
- Validate data and reduce variation.
- Compile the dashboard for senior executives.
With predefined responsibilities functional and project managers could collaborate using TouchBase to update the demand for a project/portfolio and generate automated dashboard in no time.
Risk Management:
Risks are identified using tools and techniques like brainstorming, interviewing, root cause analysis, SWOT analysis and checklist analysis. In today’s world where physical interactions are less common, digital technologies help to collaborate team members to capture ideas in a common platform or a project management software like TouchBase where you could make a checklist, organize your ideas into folders, synchronize data and share it with team members. Providing access to all team members allows them to change formatting or edit their notes.
Content management:
Content management is a set of processes and technologies that supports the collection, managing and publishing information in any form or medium. TouchBase-DMS is an enterprise wide document storage and retrieval system with features to check in/ check out/version/revision. Workflow management with digital approvals helps to collaborate team in an effective way. Documents can be attached to any WBS in project schedule for quick reference. Access to the documents can be controlled with user roles.
To conclude TouchBase is a super user-friendly project management software easy to plug in to any business needs to manage the entire project management tasks in an effective manner.
