Ever happened that you just finished planning a team project, but find yourself missing steps and tracking everyone’s tasks difficult? If so, then you should consider improving your task management workflow to coordinate and arrange tasks efficiently so that your team members can stay on track and work together seamlessly.
However, you don’t have to go through it alone! In this article, we will cover:
- What is task workflow management
- Why it is important to have one
- 4 Effective tips to implement task workflow management
- Having the right tools
What is task workflow management?
In its essence, a workflow is a series of steps and tasks required to finish a project or assignment. Think of workflow like a basket full of ingredients to cook. For a delicious result, you need to be thorough with your recipe (in this case your project) in order to use the ingredients correctly. Although this seems quite simple, if you ever tried cooking, you’ll realise how messy and easy it is to make errors even with a recipe in hand. That’s why you also need to plan directions and have the right tools to execute it. So, if a workflow is a project’s ingredients, then task management is the directions to the recipe.
Simply put, task management is planning and directing:
- What are all the tasks to be done
- When they have to be done
- How they should be done
- And who needs to do each task
Why is it important?
One way or another, somehow you will always be able to get work done, but that doesn’t mean that the quality and results will always be the best. Task management is an organised approach for your team to be more efficient, organised, empowered, and performance-driven. However, this doesn’t only help organise your team, but also external members involved to have full clarity and awareness on all details and progress of the project.
Overall, task management helps with transparency and having accountability among teams and members. It gives your team all the tools and resources they need, so you can avoid the inefficiencies of micromanaging and easily refine, adjust, and optimise your task workflow.
Now, imagine having to lay this out for your team and keeping all the work up to date in real-time as you progress on your project. Already sounds like a headache, right? That’s why we have listed below, 4 effective tips to improve your task management workflow and the tools you need to ensure your success.
4 Effective tips to implement task workflow management
Ready to take your task management workflow to the next level? See how these tips and tricks along with MORNINGMATE tools can help you improve your task workflow management:
1. Make detailed briefs and keep good record
First things first, document everything, have all your project details and tasks clear on record. When organizing your task workflow, it’s important to have specific details such as:
- Who is responsible for the project and individual tasks? Is it more than one or are there any external members involved?
- What are the deadlines and repeated processes?
MORNINGMATE’s task manager optimises this process into 5 steps so that you don’t miss any details when documenting your project’s task briefs. Remember when laying out your tasks to add as much information needed such as best practices, useful resources, or anything you consider that will help your team complete the project.
2. Consider all the dependant steps
Briefing and keeping record is just the first step to have your task workflow organised, next you want to start considering all the connections and task dependencies between the tasks, team members, and external members involved.
Sometimes some tasks can be completed in almost any order, or at least in a few phases. However, others might need a particular order with work requirements that need to be ready in order to move on to the next step or task. MORNINGMATE helps you easily define them through task grouping and subtasks so that you don’t miss out on any dependencies that could impact your project delivery schedules.
3. Audit and edit accordingly
Projects come in all types and sizes, and as you work on them, they can often suffer changes along the way. That’s why having a good overall view of the project is vital to be able to update tasks and change team members, times, and responsibilities as needed. While your original planning shouldn’t suffer many tweaks or variations, you want to make sure to keep your brief updated and track the tasks that are getting stuck or require more time than expected.
With MORNINGMATE, you can see all tasks, members, and work itinerary all at once so that it’s easy to follow-up and edit as you progress on your project. Whether it is as a Gantt chart, a calendar, or a task list, having visual clarity can make your task workflow management much easier.
4. Repeat and scale
Now that you have organised your project and optimised your task workflow, what’s next? Task workflow management is about the constant iteration of these steps for different projects as requirements such as team members, tasks, dependencies, and more, change according to the project type and size.
As we mentioned above, not all projects are made equal, sometimes you might have external members of the organisation involved for certain tasks. MORNINGMATE is one of the few collaboration tools that allow you to invite external members to work seamlessly with internal tasks without having to go through the tedious process of registration and onboarding thanks to its intuitive and user-friendly platform.
Having the right tools
As we explained above, a lot of effective task workflow management is about having the correct tools that can not only adapt to your team’s needs, but that is also simple and seamless to use. Project management or collaboration tools like MORNINGMATE are great applications that can help you with the struggles of task workflow management. However, in the sea of options that we live in today, it can be difficult choosing the right software. Remember, it’s not about having complex tools, quite the opposite, it’s about having an application that can seamlessly adapt to your team and not become another extra step in your workflow.