As with any project, program, methodology, or system the terminology you and your team use must be consistent in order to breed understanding and productivity.  Have you ever gone to work for a new organization or taken on a project in a new industry and wished someone had published a glossary of terminology and acronyms?  I know I have…I’ve even go so far as to create my own along the way and offered to share them with whoever was interested...and there was always interest because there were always those who didn’t know all the terminology but figured they should because they had been there so long and were afraid to admit it.  But if the new guy is offering…they’re happy to take it!  Glad I could help….

Back to the issue management and project management concept.  Think in terms of solving issues.  When referring to elements of an application, should they be stated in terms of “modules” or “components”? Do those two terms mean the same thing to you? Do they mean the same thing to everyone?  In some organizations design and development are broken out while in others the term ‘development’ covers the entire process after requirements till user acceptance testing. And what about change management?  Does that cover change orders only or configuration management only or both? Could these terms be confused leading to poor issue management and resolution that happens in a less than timely manner?  Definitely.  One misstep, one bad assumption on the meaning of a certain terminology can potentially end up causing a huge problem on any given project at any given time.

Consistency and understanding is key

The key is that when we’re managing issues and assigning issue management like tasks on a project – giving full oversight and ownership of the management, work, and resolution of the issues to individual team members, we have to be certain we’re speaking a common language.  I’ve always said that efficient and effective communication is Job One for the project manager. Without it, too many things can be misinterpreted, too many things could fall through the cracks, team members can get off task and misaligned with the goals of the project and organization, and customers can lose confidence in the delivery teams ability to actually deliver.  Common ground must be established in order to ensure that everyone is working on a level playing field and that issues are being effectively managed and resolved toward the proper successful end goal of the solution you are trying to deliver.

It is critical that an organization adopt readily understood and consistent terminology for their company and for the projects that happen in their organization.  And it is also the project manager’s job to ensure that the consistent terminology is in place prior to the start of the project.  Indeed, as part of any project risk management process, the concept of identifying potential terminology issues lies with the project manager and the entire project team (and customer) to sort out at the beginning of the engagement and to closely monitor throughout the lifecycle of the project.

For issue management and project tracking on your ongoing engagements, check out Gemini.  Gemini uses understandable and consistent industry-specific terminology to facilitate the most collaborative situation possible for everyone involved on the project.  Gemini can meet all of your task management needs for your organization.

Yes, this is an odd one.  I'm no fan of rap.  I'm no fan of Tupac, dead or alive.  And I certainly don't approve of his lyrics.  However, his recent post-mortem appearance (lyric/language content warning) rapping two songs - including one with Snoop Dogg - at the Coachella music festival in California a few days ago was nothing short of amazing.  First described as a hologram costing millions of dollars it turns out it was actually a $400,000 CGI (computer-generated imagery).  Still, it was cool, and it got me thinking.

Actually, I've had ideas in my head for a long time as to where holographic images will be taking us in the future.  For sports fans like me, I believe that we're not far from taking sports to the 3D level in our homes...actually playing in our homes.  In the near future, I believe we'll have projected 3D NFL football games, MLB baseball games, and NBA basketball games playing before our very eyes on tabletops, large game room floors, etc....all scaled to fit the locale with amazing clarity.  Watching LeBron James dunk right in front of you in your own home in 3D is closer than you think.

That said, this concept can be used to make business drastically greener.  And as a project manager who has routinely traveled with large teams to customer sites for expensive status meetings, I can tell you that the use of this technology - in 'live' mode, not dead Tupac mode - can mean no one has to travel anywhere.  A room set up at each site with the right technology will mean status meeting participants can interact personally with each other - actually with their counterparts hologram or image - without ever getting on a plane.  The startup costs will be a little steep I'm sure, but once in place the savings will be enormous and the reduction in an organization's carbon footprint will be huge.  Think about it....

by Josh Yeager, Swift Software

Our development team uses an “agile” software process, which means that we work in a series of two-week plan->code->test->polish iterations. As we complete each iteration, we install a small new feature set on our internal production server for alpha testing. Each iteration completes a small portion of the overall development plan. After two to ten iterations, a whole set of features that have passed QA are designated as complete, and we build a final release and announce it to our customers.

Our JobTraQ system manages this process for us in several ways. First, it manages our feature wishlist and roadmap. We have a parent project called “Future”, which contains subprojects that stage all of our feature ideas, enhancements, and strategic goals that are not on our immediate roadmap. A second project is called “Planning Queue”, and that project contains all of the tasks and projects that we plan to complete in the next two releases. We simply drag and drop the appropriate features into this “Planning Queue” project as we approach the iteration they will be developed in.  Over time, our product management team prioritizes these items, plans their details, and reviews them with the development team to ensure they are technically sound. We work together to refine the time estimates and identify possible problems, so that all the basic details are decided by the time we’re ready to start working on each task.

Second, JobTraQ manages our iterations. At the start of each iteration, the development team sits down and pulls the top items from the planning queue into a new project for the iteration. They select a set of tasks that can be completed within a two-week iteration, and then they plan those tasks in detail. All of the decisions and designs that they create are recorded in the JobTraQ tasks. Then, throughout the iteration, they track their progress and time spent in those tasks, record notes about their designs and code, and close the tasks when they are complete. To help usall stay coordinated, JobTraQ sends email notifications to the team when tasks are updated and closed, and we have a “burn-up” chart report that is sent to the team every day to compare our closed tasks to our goal.

Example Burn Up Chart

The third thing that JobTraQ manages is customer support. When a new email request comes in, we use the new beta version of our two-way email processing feature to automatically create a task for the request and log the time that it came in. Then, as our support team and the customer reply to each email, all of the replies are logged in that task. Screenshots or attached files are also extracted from the emails and attached to the task. When the issue is resolved, the task is closed. Along the way, JobTraQ email notifications inform the team about the state of the active support cases, and the support task list reminds us about support requests that have not been resolved and questions that the customer has not replied to in a while. These tools help us ensure that no customer request is forgotten or mishandled. We use the same process for support phone calls, although we have to update JobTraQ manually after each call.

The common thread among all three of these processes is that JobTraQ holds all of the information about our plans and our current work, as well as the status and progress of the tasks that we are working on. As a result, we almost never lose track of a project or request. We don’t forget about our bigger plans while we’re working on the details. And we can predict and evaluate our development timelines, support responsiveness, and team productivity. All these benefits are extremely helpful to me as the product leader and to the individuals and teams that work on our product.

In future posts, we will be discussing the ways that we use JobTraQ to manage other parts of our business, and we may even highlight some of our customers’ processes if anyone is interested in sharing. As always, if you have any questions, please comment below.

If you are in need of a full-featured Task Management software tool - I recommend you check out JobTraQ.  Take a tour of the product or request a demo.  Trust me - it will be time well spent. - Brad Egeland