How do small and medium businesses benefit from Task Management software?
Every Greg Wilson them in the process.
Task management software is a tool that can help you trace and schedule your tasks, manage your resources, and thereby keep up with the project timelines.
This applies especially to small and medium businesses where there are fewer resources that can significantly benefit by using a task management tool.
Types of Task Management Tools
Depending on your needs, task management software can be relatively simple or very feature-rich. The types of tools available out there can be broken down in the following categories,
Manual Task Management
Manual task management is one of the primary ways to manage your tasks. Physical items such a Whiteboards, high stacks of paper sheets, and a drawer full of markers have virtually no association with anything digital that’s why they are called manual.
As they are manual, these tools work best for people who have small teams and tasks that don’t change very often. So the organizations that have very standardized tasks rely upon the use of manual task management as they are flexible and can be managed efficiently by a small team. The system can also be easily personalized as per the organization’s needs.
Electronic Task Management
Next step to achieve more productive results after manual task management is upgrading your system to electronic task management. Electronic tools provide you with the opportunity to harness the power of electronic computing. It gives you more flexibility and functionality. Unlike manual, the electronic task management tools are not confined by space; the user can put as much information as they like on one device.
Along with the advantage of portability, the electronic tools also have features such as tracking, analytics, and reporting. The devices come in a broad form of variety, counting from spreadsheets in your desktop to more complex and feature-rich task management applications. All these tools can be integrated into one enterprise-level task management solution.
Online Task Management
Online task management is the combination of electronic management tools with the unlimited power and reach of the internet. Both these can be presented in a packaged form as a software or a web-based online platform that can be used by the team from anywhere in the world. Most of the online task management software available today is based on cloud storage, and so can easily backup all the saved data on the cloud using the internet.
What does it offer?
The following are task management software features that could benefit your business in both the long and short-run:
Task planning and scheduling
This feature allows you to quickly outline all the tasks you require to complete and later schedule them as per your priority. As a result, the team manager will always have access to all the tasks planned by the team members so he can have an idea of how many hours a particular member is using to accomplish a given job.
Task tracking
In a big team with many members, it can be tough to keep track of all the tasks allocated and the milestones of all the tasks. To make this process easier, the task management tool provides the task tracking function, which can give precisely the beginning, the middle, and the completion stage of each task.
The managers can also properly prioritize all the tasks as per their level of urgency, and the team members who have access to the software can have access. When all tasks are being tracked as per their priority, it becomes easier for the teams to set their pace according to the urgency of each task.
Calendar management
A feature-rich and excellent task management tool also comes with the ability to integrate all your tasks with a calendar to manage them efficiently. By doing these, you can have a clear idea of timelines according to which all the jobs could be scheduled. A central calendar can help you mark deadlines for a particular task and then take a quick follow up. You can also schedule meetings and conferences with your teams with the help of a calendar.
Collaboration
When working on a big project, you often have to work with other teams from different departments. Therefore having a task management tool that is designed for smooth collaboration can go a long way. Miscommunication or complications in a task can significantly affect your team’s overall productivity.
Time tracking
In order to streamline your work, you need to monitor every second spend on each activity. The hours worked by the employees on the project are then logged in timesheets, and later they can be reviewed by the management.
Reporting
Monitoring and observation are a part of task management; in order to make progress, it is essential to do so. This regulates the flow of tasks, which then avoids situations such as missing deadlines.
Software that provides you with useful analytics and reporting tools is worth investing for. You can also try open-source free task management software available.
Author Bio: I am Greg Wilson, a Content Writer working with GoodFirms, a research and review platform for service and software companies. I am passionate about blogging, creative writing, social media, and content marketing. I write blog posts for GoodFirms about SEO softwares, Cloud computing, IoT development, and many more such categories.
