Let’s say you are the manager (or project manager) of a software development project involving one or more business analyst(s), three or more developers, and quality assurance personnel. The development effort may be geographically located at one site, dispersed over a region or country, or may be a virtual team composed of multiple resources all over the world. Your key objectives are to assure the ultimate user of the software is satisfied with your end product (i.e., that upon implementation it meets the user’s needs as originally presented to you), that it is completed within the time frame you specified, and that the overall developments costs stay within an agreed upon budget. Anyone who has been associated with software development of any size beyond several weeks knows these objectives are often difficult to achieve, with a myriad of challenges arising every step of the way – and that is even assuming, of course, that each member of the project team is a competent professional.
Whether those team members are in the same locale, or even more so if they are geographically dispersed, one of the key ingredients to helping you meet your project targets is for you to identify and stay constantly on top of the hundreds – often thousands – of tasks which make up the project. You need:
- To document those tasks (and/or issues, or problems, or defects) at the beginning of the project and then as they arise during the project time frame.
- To be able to assign – and reassign – those issues to the team member responsible for completing them.
- A way for those assignees to keep you up to date as to the status of their progress on the task on a daily basis (or whatever time frame you determine) and document what they have done.
- To be able to easily track a number of different milestone dates, such as date code completed, date testing began, date re-work assigned, etc., as those tasks wend their way to completion.
- To have a way for any team member, or any other person you designate (a key user, for example) to be able to stay current on each new event pertaining to an issue or to the overall project.
- To group all the issues for this project into a report for easy viewing at project update meetings, and that they be capable of being sorted into any number of useful ways, such as by team member, by status, by specific milestone date, etc.
- To have the ability to attach any other file or document to an issue electronically so it can be viewed and used by anyone who needs the information in it.
- The ability to customize any number of items (fields) related to the issues in your project, with values you deem necessary, so that they fully meet your unique needs for managing that project. So, for example, you may have specific status codes or values you want to use, or specific issue or task types you may wish to designate.
The best way to address all these needs is by deploying and making effective use of a web based task tracking system which incorporates all these features (and more), assures ongoing security for your information, and won’t break your project’s budget. All you have to do is assure that all tasks and issues are entered, which in turn will give you, your team members, and your customers always-on access to all of that project’s critical status.