What Is IT Task Management Software?
In order to understand what IT Task Management Software is, we need to understand what constitutes the task. A task constitutes of sequential steps and activities performed to achieve a desired outcome. Managing any task that is associated with Information Technology or IT is IT Task Management. In large multinational companies, IT Operations teams or Project Managers are often daunted with challenges of managing multiple resources that may be working on different tasks. Not to mention the various aspects such as cost, dependency and availability etc. associated with a resource working on a project. Taking leverage of the tools and capabilities, the software provides, IT operations team can successfully manage their handling of day-to-day system administration activities seamlessly.
Large organizations, will have a Guided Procedure Management framework along with IT Task Management Tool. The framework and management tool together provide authoring, planning, executing as well as reporting capabilities for IT operations managers. Using the guided procedures, managers can create tasks in the Planning Tool while operators perform or execute these tasks defined by their managers as and when they are assigned to them. The reporting capability of the tool helps managers monitor the status of a particular task.
With the ever-growing business, the scope and expectations out of IT Managers is also growing. In order to the make an IT manager’s life simple, the scope of task management software is being widened. Present day task management software is expected to provide support across various domains such as bug tracking, issue tracking and project management. Bug tracking is the process of tracking reported software bugs in software development projects while issue tracking relates more with customers and customer reported issues. On the other hand, project management involves initiating, planning, executing, control and monitoring and closing of the project.
Written in Java and developed by Atlassian, the software Jira is the best example in this category. Let’s take a closer look at the work flow in Jira to better understand the IT task management process using a software. When the software development team completes coding of a particular module of the software, they release the code to testers for testing and identifying bugs in the software. The testers test the software and log the bugs in Jira. They associate each bug to its respective project and assign the task of eliminating the bug to the developer who created the code. The task gets transferred to the developer and will remain in his queue. Once the developer makes changes or corrects the code, he can transfer back the task to software tester for retesting. The task at this stage, gets reassigned to the tester. The software tester repeats his testing and either closes the task or reassigns it based on whether the bug is resolved or whether it requires rework. At each and every stage of this process, the task will have various statuses associated with it. The IT Managers with the capabilities provided by the task management software can review the status and ensure the progress on the task is made within the defined timelines.