Perfecting Project Management

@task is a comprehensive, Web-based project and portfolio-management package. It's available as a locally installed server-based product or a hosted service.

@task opens with a dashboard showing summaries of all the available projects.Selecting a project opens up the details of that project. You can see tasks to be done and to whom they're assigned, as well as details like start date and duration. You can display these tasks in a Gantt chart format or a tabular listing. You can also examine the resources allocated and in use on the project.

@task lets you do more than plan and execute a project. Each project worker has their own workspace, listing the projects on which they're working, the tasks for which they have responsibility and any issues arising during the course of a project. This helps project managers track tasks, as well as issues like budgetary concerns, resource limitations and other items that may affect project schedules. For example, if your lead admin breaks his leg and is out of the office for two weeks in the middle of a migration, you can note that as an issue, alert all project participants and plan accordingly.

Using resources and issues at an individual level also lets @task act as a project hour aggregator. Each contributor can enter the actual hours allocated to their tasks. These entries are rolled into a summary view on both the number of hours you have invested in a project and who is contributing those hours. You could use this for tracking project costs, schedules and for billing purposes. It's also enormously helpful in maintaining a database of project costs for future-project planning purposes. @task excels at giving you an overarching view of multiple projects and letting you dynamically balance resources across those projects.

The dashboard gives summary information of every project for which your users have privileges. By drilling into a resource view, you can see at a glance what resources are overcommitted. By moving individual projects along a timeline, executives can re-align the project portfolio in response to the individual project's needs and priorities.

Source: redmondmag.com, March 7, 2008

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Learn more about AtTask's online project management software and popular project management tools.