Task management

Task management is the process of managing a task through its lifecycle. It involves planning, testing, tracking, and reporting. Task management can help either individual achieve goals, or groups of individuals collaborate and share knowledge for the accomplishment of collective goals. Tasks are also differentiated by complexity, from low to high. Effective task management requires managing all aspects of a task, including its status, priority, time, human and financial-resources assignments, recurrence, dependency, notifications,etc. These can be lumped together broadly into the basic activities of task management. Managing multiple individuals or team tasks may be assisted by specialized software, for example workflow or project-management software, and such software may sometimes be referred to a productivity system. Task management may form part of project management and process management, and can serve as the foundation for efficient workflow in an organization. Project managers adhering to task-oriented management have a detailed and up-to-date project schedule, and are usually good at directing team members and moving the project forward. The status of tasks can be described by these states: Ready Assigned Terminated Expired Forwarded Started Finished Verified Paused Failed The state machine diagram to the right is referenced from IBM, and describes different states of a task over its lifecycle. A more up-to-date task-state machine diagram, which is applicable to the modern continuous delivery method, has also been published. As a discipline, task management embraces several key activities. Various conceptual breakdowns exist, and these, at a high level, always include creative, functional, project, performance, and service activities. Creative activities pertain to task creation. In context, these should allow for task planning, brainstorming, creation, elaboration, clarification, organization, reduction, targeting, and preliminary prioritization.