How to use Virola Task Board for project management
Task management is an important part of project management workflow. It involves monitoring project's tasks through all their phases until completion. By using task board for task management, you can monitor, organize, manage your team's progress over a specific time period and meet deadlines.
Imagine, that right after starting a project, you have all its details noted on a piece of paper without any structure and visualization. To meet deadlines, distribute tasks and set their priority you need to add them to a task board where they can be tracked and managed.
What is Task Board?
Task board gives project managers better understanding of every task and process related to the project development process. It can be a simple white board with a paper stickers on it or it can be a more functional digital Kanban board where tasks can be filtered by their priority, assignee and so on. This tool helps to visualize progress, monitor tasks, set priorities and get a clear understanding of the project development success.
Task board is integral part of scrum environment where both the customer and project manager can monitor the progress in real time and see which tasks are being processed. Moreover, it serves as a meeting point for teams to set task priorities, discuss updates and deadlines.
The importance of Task Board
For many companies, the task board has become an integral part of the collaboration process. It helps plan, execute and monitor tasks and employees' progress. Project managers can track the results and distribute the load among team members. It also significantly enhances the collaboration process within the team.
- Improves collaboration. With the help of the task board employees can reassign tasks and ask their more experienced co-workers for advice. In this case the whole history of task changes will be kept and it will be possible to see what kind of issues the assignees have faced. Another advantage is the ability to keep all project information in one place. Instead of exchanging messages in private chats employees can assign tasks and track their progress without losing any valuable details.
- Increases efficiency. Employees do not lose their time on double checking task details and searching for task requirements. They have all the necessary information on the task board and this in turn significantly increases their efficiency.
- Reduces waste. Human resources are optimized for better results. Project managers can easily track tasks on the task board and monitor the success. By having all project information at fingertips they get a better insight, can set tasks priority and regulate employees' load.
How Virola Task Board works
Virola corporate messenger was initially designed for internal communication in a software development company. However, while using this secure messenger, it was decided to grow the project and make the software for product development teams' collaboration in a scrum environment. Thus, besides all features for efficient communication and video conferencing, Virola corporate messenger has an integrated task board which allows tracking and managing tasks.
Virola tasks or issues can be created in two ways:
- From text messages: you just need to right click on the message and convert it to the issue.
- From scratch: by entering your task description in the messages input area and selecting its priority, type, queue and assignee.
The created tasks will be visible in the chat rooms where they were created and on the task board.
Virola task board gives an ability to filter tasks. They can be filtered by the following parameters:
- Chat room name. You can name the chat rooms by projects and add there all necessary participants. This way by using this filter you will be able to see all tasks in the specific project.
- Status. In Virola there is a possibility to select the status for the issue and change it while making updates: To Do, Backlog, To Verify, in Progress, Done, Declined.
- Type. Tasks in Virola can be assigned the following types: Task, Subtask, Bug, Epic, Story, Feature request, Merge request. Such tasks distribution makes it possible to use Virola in scrum environment for software development teams.
- Priority. When creating or editing the task it is possible to set its priority: Blocker, Critical, High, Normal, Low, Trivial. This way it will be clear which tasks should be processed in the first place.
- Reporter. The person who created the task.
- Assignee. The person who got the task.
Such tasks filtering makes it possible to see all active tasks of the specific person, to check which tasks have the highest priority and display all closed tasks for the project. In addition, all filtered tasks can be sorted in ascending or descending order by creation date.
Virola task board is the tool which allows using Virola collaboration tool in scrum environment for communication and tasks tracking. The task board can be undocked and set to be displayed on a separate monitor. This way, project managers can see the progress without switching to the task board and interrupting their communication process.
Virola task board will significantly improve and facilitate project management and task management processes. It can be used both by team leaders and project managers to keep track of the progress, manage tasks and make reports.