Task Management Blog

Recently old-style hierarchical management gives place to a more flexible model – collaborative management. Horizontal teamwork is more important than vertical hierarchy now. But a new model sends new challenges. The managers should be able to control a number of autonomous employees that could be located all over the world. What kind of automation and collaboration software does meet the needs of collaborative management? Is it project software or group collaboration software? Or could they be combined somehow?

Time management is a perfect way to organize your everyday workflow and save your time and efforts. There are multiple ideas and practices that may help you make better use of your time. Choosing and combining the principles and techniques that meet your personal needs you can build your own time management solution. Time management program helps you to integrate your favourite methods in a system. There is a wide variety of time management products on the market. How to select?

Time sheet is a simple method for tracking an amount of a worker’s time spent on each job. The more information a time sheet includes, the more useful it is. Time sheet software makes creating, collecting, compiling and analyzing time sheets much faster and easier. Also time time sheet tracking software may give you even more benefits. A multifunctional time sheet program is helpful for project management, HR, team cooperation, everyday workflow monitoring and many more.

Project manager should be able to deal with three project management constraints, which are scope, cost, and time. Constant tracking of the three constraints is very important for successful project accomplishment. Project management tracking software could be extremely helpful for everyday monitoring. How project manager can make use of project software? How time tracking and cost tracking tools can help to achieve the project goals successfully?

Usually many employees are involved in a project. They could even be located at the different sides of the world. One of the main project manager’s duties is to establish team collaboration within a project. What software tools could be helpful? How document management software may help establish effective collaboration within a team? Can the same tool be used both for document management and team collaboration?

The main feature in version 2.8.1 is possibility to access the database from remote office, home or any other place via low speed networks. In order to provide such a feature we had to make some changes in the architecture of our software. Here is a brief description that should help you understand better how the program works now:

All the earliest version of VIP Task Manager (up to v2.5.1) had 2 components: Database and Database Management System (FIREBIRD). All the requests were sent directly from client component to FIREBIRD server component, which sent responses back to client component. When trying to work in low speed networks, due to abundance of small packets there were essential delays in time between request and response. Here is how we solved this issue - Version 2.8.1 has 3 components: Database, Server and Database Management System (FIREBIRD). Now the client component gathers small packets into big one and sends it to server component, which executes its commands and redirects other commands to FIREBIRD.

That is how it looks in general and it is enough if you work in default conditions, ex.: standard firewall, default database location, etc. In this case, the new version will be updated almost automatically – all you need to do is to uninstall the previous version and install the new one. However many customers may have some individual conditions under which they use the program, so they may be interested in the following details:

1. All the earliest version of VIP Task Manager (up to v2.5.1) used two ports: one for our service VIPAutoDBInfo (5089 by default) and another for FIREBIRD (3050 by default). Version 2.8.1 uses only one port (6725 by default) because there is no need in VIPAutoDBInfo any more.

2. If you store the database in some place different from default location, after uninstalling the previous version and installing the new one you will need to register the database by using Database Manager (C:\Program Files\VIP Quality Software\VIP Task Manager Professional\DBAdminUtils\)

Now I archive tasks the following way:
1. I created folder 'Archive' in the root and allowed Administrator only to see this folder.
2. At the end of the month I login as Administrator and drag'n'drop all completed tasks to this folder 'Archive'

This way is OK, but somewhat... hmm... manual.
We think of a better way of archiving tasks and would appreciate your ideas.

Mine is here:
1. The folder 'Archive' is created automatically
2. If you have rights you can send tasks to Archive folder by a) selecting a task and clicking on a button in the main toolbar b) right-clicking on a task and selecting Send task to Archive option in the context menu. All these options are grey if you don't have rights to archive tasks.
3. The tasks can be restored. If the folder where this task came from doesn't exist any more you need to select the folder to which the selected task should be restored.

How do you think it should work?

We added feature that will highlight the tasks that are overdue (their due date or finish date is over but their status is still not "Completed" i.e. not 100%). The background of such tasks will be filled with a color (default one or selected by user).

Everything is fine except for the default color of the background. All of us suggested different colors. Red, green, orange...

Red is quite practical, users will try to complete the tasks by all means, not to see this aggressive color on their screen.

Green usually means the start, something not completed yet, still it is too peaceful...

Orange is nice however raises the desire to eat something, rather than the desire to finish something...

What will you suggest?

How would you know that your team member has completed the task you assigned to him? Stupid question: surely, he will tell you! Or if you use task collaboration tools like VIP Task Manager, he will change the status of the task to 'Completed' and you will immediately receive notification of it as you are the owner of the task. But what if your team member is always forgetting about task reports. He is a good employee and does his work well, so the reports are his only shortcoming and there is nothing you can do about that.

Here are some things I do to make my team members notify me of tasks they completed. First of all, each Friday I ask (create a task) my team to look through their tasks and change status of those which are completed. Second, if I know approximate date or time when the task should be already completed, I set Reminder for this task to popup on team member's desktop at that day and time. Third, I will insist on adding a feature that will automatically highlight (display in red or whatever) the tasks that are overdue (their due date or finish date is over, but the status is not complete yet).

If you know any other ways to make your team members notify you of tasks they completed or you need the feature I described as the third way, let me know. The more votes we have for this feature, the sooner it will be added.

That is the question I ask myself from time to time. I believe any team leader does the same, no matter how good his team is. Most often these are tasks I used to do myself before. Let's say I'm planning to write a press release about new version of our product. Who is the best person for doing this task? Maybe John, our new copywriter?

No, way. I am. I frankly believe that I will do the work better and faster. I know all the new features, the best way to describe them, the terms to be used, and many other tricks for editors to accept the news for publication. As a result of 5 minutes hesitation I create the task "Write press release VIP Task Manager 2.0" and assign myself to this task, overloading my task list with one more thing I could delegate.

But stop... I don't have time for these things. I simply shouldn't do it. It is not my job any more. Why do I need a team if not for delegating my tasks to other people? It is much easier to do the job by myself but if I go on doing that way I will never be able to delegate some of the tasks and my team will never learn how to do it right.

Most likely, I hesitate to delegate tasks because I'm not sure that the task will be completed the way I want. To solve this I should formulate my requirements more clearly and besides entering the name of the task and checking the box of assigned team member I should set a priority, deadline and description of preferred outcome in the Note tab as well.

VIP Task Manager makes it easier to delegate tasks and track them till they are completed, but it is me who should stop myself from overwhelming my task list. I know that the answer for the question of this article is almost always 'yes', still sometimes I can't help assigning myself to the tasks I plan. If any of you faces the same problem, I welcome your comments and experiences.