This paper is dedicated to the tasks management process. It is well known, that any problem-solving project aims to eliminate or at least decline a disadvantage. There is a huge number of disadvantages, or how some people may call it visible symptoms. For instance: High cost of a product, Low productivity of production line, Insufficient reliability of a device, Floods causing destruction, Power glitches resulting in damage to the equipment and so on. One can continue the list of potential disadvantages of any situation. And every disadvantage is going to be something different and can lead to different problems. However, the approach to eliminate a disadvantage and eventually solve the problem is pretty straightforward.
Overall, the concept is very simple:
It might feel very simplistic. It is indeed so, and yet very powerful if we understand the importance of every phase. In this article, we want to concentrate on task management.
Try to think about any project you’ve been ever involved in. You can most likely pinpoint all four of the phases that we described above.
Without a problem to solve you wouldn’t need to start a project. And in order to solve the problem and succeed with your initiative, you or the team have to do something. Hence, we create and manage tasks, assign them to team members with a target to complete them.
Continuing this chain, we can claim that success, actually, depends on proper task management.
Generally speaking: the more the better. We would need a relatively large number of tasks to ensure that the most effective tasks are on the list. On the other hand, with a long list of tasks to manage, we increase the project’s time and cost. So, we found a contradiction:
We want a large list of tasks to ensure that we address the most important ones. But, we should keep the list short to avoid excessive project timelines and high costs.
How can we solve this contradiction?
The best way is to use the separation principle – the strongest principle in problem-solving.
In our case, the solution is a reasonable ranking of the tasks. The ranking based on engineering expertise and experience.
PRIZ Innovation Platform comprises both documentation and task ranking using the Round Robin Ranking (RRR) creative thinking tool. We described concepts and the rules in some of our blogs: Round Robin Ranking (RRR) is a practical problem-solving and Choosing the destination for a company retreat with RRR.
When a team tanks their project tasks, they effectively create separation and extract the most important or effective ones from the rest. If we address the most important tasks first, we will get to project resolution much faster. From our experience, project teams almost never complete all the tasks. The solution normally comes sooner.
Eventually, we save ourselves time and money.
The tasks management tool is recommended for task documentation, ranking, completion and tracking.
Below is an example of the Task Manager in action:
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