Tuesday, 1 February 2022

How to effectively use project management tools to improve work efficiency?




The object of project management is the team, so a good project management tool should achieve the effect of benefiting everyone and improving the efficiency of each member:



a good project management tool is a good help for product development progress control and teamwork. if you use it well, you will achieve the effect of doing more with less; if you use it well, it will not only fail to improve efficiency and bring help, but also become a burden in your work. when we use project management tools, what are the points we should pay attention to? the article is interpreted for you.


1. find the right tool



for the leader, you can control the overall situation of the project: you can view the summary information, including but not limited to the project progress summary; the task situation of each member, the project task list summary; the project iteration route (version route); the project document filing summary.
for employees, they can take control of their specific work: they can view their own work list; they can visually view their current task volume; and they can transfer tasks to the next person in charge.


for the team, you can control the iteration progress of the project: you can view the iteration progress of the project; when you encounter problems, you can trace the root cause; you can view the flow of tasks, the historical version of the project document, the iteration of the project, and so on.


2. clear task flow process



a clear task management process helps team members grasp the pace of their work and ensures that everyone understands and agrees. it also ensures monitoring of the iterative process and traceability of the later stages.

depending on the task type, the flow process is different:



taking the development task as an example, the process path experienced is explained in detail as follows:


with a standard task creation and turnover process, project work is broken down into specific tasks and directed to specific people. after each person completes the task at hand, it is clearly assigned to the next person in charge to improve everyone's control over their work. it also ensures that each task has a beginning and an end, has a clear trajectory, and facilitates the overall supervision of the project.


3. the particle size of the task with the appropriate thickness



development, testing, o&m, documentation, design 5 types of tasks cover almost all the details of a project, at this time, it is easy to have a large amount of tasks caused by too fine task granularity. when the amount of tasks in each person's hands reaches a certain critical value, not only can not help everyone control the work, but due to information overload caused great trouble, people have to spend a lot of time and energy to review and process these tasks, and can not focus on the completion of the task itself.

therefore, the appropriate particle size of the thickness is the key to the construction task. the rules that should generally be followed are as follows:



Create a new development task in one iteration: describe the story point of the iteration in the description of the task; supplement the requirements file such as PRD in the form of an attachment


there are several sub-development tasks and o&m tasks under an iterative task: the newly created iterative task is disassembled into multiple development sub tasks in terms of function, which is convenient for assigning to specific r&d personnel; the o&m task for this iteration is hung under the corresponding iteration task:


the bug of a certain function is hung under the corresponding development task: the test bug is a sub task of the development task, which is convenient to see the bug of a certain function that someone is responsible for, and it is also convenient to quickly locate the function in the bug set:


create new test bugs by type: if each small problem is referred to as a test bug, there will be a scene of bug flooding, for this reason, the bugs should be classified by type, and a summary bug of the same category can be mentioned. such as text error class, style does not match the class.



4. regular project meetings for review



clear rules cannot become bearish regulations, but focus on adherence to the implementation process. because everyone's work habits are deeply rooted and they often forget to follow the rules, it is necessary to hold regular (usually biweekly) regular project meetings, at which task lists are reviewed. the main agenda of the regular sessions are:


project progress review: review the completion of each task against the current version of the schedule. this process makes it easy to identify risks in the project schedule and facilitates early measures to prevent risks.


task list review for each member of the team: by reviewing the task list in each person's hand, you can find out whether the work distribution is balanced; secondly, in the process of review, find out the redundant task lists that are not created and circulated according to the rules, and merge, close and other processing. prevent tools from impacting team efficiency by cleaning up redundant tasks. through the discussion at the meeting, it is a good reminder to everyone to abide by the rules (it should be noted that when the review finds that the rules are not met, it should only be pointed out where the rules are not met and corrected, rather than blaming the parties).


5. monitor the task list at any time



project managers should always pay attention to the use of tools and identify problems in a timely manner. perhaps the main points of concern are:


tasks that are not updated within a week: if a task is not updated within a week, there are two situations: the person concerned forgets to deal with it; the task granularity is too large. at this time, it should be raised in time to find out where the problem is and solve it, so as to prevent a problem from being omitted or the work distribution is not reasonable.


number of test bug lists: among project management tools, the largest task list is test bugs. in order to prevent the task granularity from being too fine to cause trouble to everyone, you should pay attention to the test bug list in time and merge the very small bugs in time.


the combination of short-term real-time monitoring and regular project meetings effectively controls the status of the project while enabling the team to better use the tools.


admittedly, there are a wide variety of project management tools to choose from, each with its own advantages. regardless of the tool used, it is the first priority to use it wisely and make it more efficient for the team, and it should not be used for the sake of using tools, but make it a burden on the team's work.



 

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