Every project consists of an array of tasks you need to finish in time. Proper task management means managing projects from conception to completion. Whether you’re a part of a team working from the office or home, the task management process can make you face some common challenges.
Find out the five common task management challenges you and your team can face and how you can overcome them with tools.
1. No Visibility on Task Progress
One of the preconditions of timely task completion and successful collaboration is task progress visibility. Without it, administering the tasks becomes a challenge for any team. You can expect to quickly resolve any problem only by ensuring transparency in task progress.
With Kanban boards, you can establish a visual overview of the project workflow. Trello is a Kanban board app that allows you to streamline all the tasks by identifying bottlenecks in the process. This app not only makes task progress accessible, but also lets you take decisive actions to keep the long-pending tasks moving.
Using the Gantt chart tool is another useful way to track task progress. With the Agantty app, the team members can sync their tasks accordingly. It also lets you assign and delegate tasks to the available resources.
2. Email Dependency Hampering Work
Clear communication is essential for any team to complete the tasks within the stipulated time and with full efficiency. While email is a popular mode of communication among team members, full-fledged dependency on email can be counterproductive and hamper productivity.
As for a team, one of the biggest task management challenges is to keep everyone on the same page by communicating the required messages. Here, communicating what and how—both become crucial. If someone spends more time checking, writing, and replying to emails than productive tasks, the purpose of email communication will fail.
With MeisterTask, you can centralize the information-sharing process by the team members. You can facilitate better team communication by adding the task description, attachments, task change log, and comments in the task itself. These features make a task interactive and trackable.
By tracking a project, you can stay in the loop and get all the necessary information. You can quickly reply to any task changes with emojis and get notifications via email for such changes.
3. Lack of Structured Performance Reports
To know about the efficiency and productivity of your team, getting a complete overview of each team member's performance is necessary. Without the proper insight, no one can possibly know about the task's progress. Only a structured report can generate insights about the whole process the team has been going through.
Such reports not only offer valuable insights into tasks and projects. They also present the collecting information in an easily understandable way. When you have the complete picture in one place, taking measures to improve task efficiency becomes seamless.
Structured reports also let you generate different statistics using the crucial metrics and customize how you want to see the details. You can use the Universal Reporting feature of Asana to get graphical charts and graphs on the performance of your team. In a few clicks, you can get hold of the real-time productivity status of your team.
Every team member can create their productivity dashboard with this tool that’ll visually represent the performance metrics. Individuals can share the read-only reports with internal and external collaborators. Customizing the reports is also easy as you can add various filters, choose chart types, and assign a separate color for each project.
4. Absence of Effortless Automation
In the modern business world, the importance of task automation is paramount. Without it, managing your tasks and completing the project in time will be difficult. The absence of automation can also lead to productivity issues in your team and slow execution of tasks.
Therefore, you should use different tools to automate tasks and save your team from spending time manually performing those tasks. While choosing the automation tools, make sure these have more benefits than drawbacks like steep learning curve, slowing down of the system, and excessive time consumption.
When it comes to automation, you can use any number of tools depending on your scope of work. Besides taking off the team workload, intelligent automation lets you focus on the tasks that matter. While using multiple automation tools, you can take help from Zapier for effortless integration between the apps.
Some of the popular integrations that Zapier supports are:
- Google Sheets and Toggl: Use to manage projects for remote and hybrid teams.
- ClickUp and TimeDoctor: Use to track productive hours and manage tasks.
- Trello and Jira: Use to track issues while managing tasks through the Kanban-style tool.
- Asana and HubSpot: Used to sync CRM software with a project management tool.
- ClickUp and Jira: Use to track and resolve issues while monitoring tasks.
5. Dealing With Scope Creep
Scope creep is a common task management challenge that teams face. It refers to the changes in project requirements from what you decided at project initiation. These changes have an impact on both the purpose and deliverables of the project.
You need to be aware of scope creep while planning a project and assigning tasks to the members. Regardless of the industry, you can prevent it by risk assessment and being conscious during project mapping.
Every project comes with some extent of risk, and having a contingency plan in place from the beginning can save you from any unexpected situation. Also, constantly evaluating risks during the project life cycle will also help you manage the risks. By using monday.com, you can tactfully handle scope creep in your projects.
The project risk register of this app enables you to locate, evaluate, and plan for a possible incident so that you can mitigate the risks. Using its Scrum sprint planning template, you can make your team stay focused on specific tasks and goals. The Change Management Tracker of this tool lets you outline and track change management plans.
Task Management Issues Resolved
Task management issues can result in delayed projects and unhappy clients. Be aware of the potential problems you may face regarding task management.
As this article discussed the challenges and their viable solutions, you can now take necessary actions to avoid such issues to ensure seamless project management.