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How to manage your task backlog

Team planning with sticky notes
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

In its purest form, project management effectively boils down to a straightforward question: Who will do what by then? That implies, however, that we already know in what order we should do the work, so let's start there.

Assess the project backlog on a task-by-task basis and try to estimate each task's properties:

  • How important is this task?
  • How urgent is it?
  • What is the business impact?
  • Are there any risks involved?
  • Does it have any dependencies on other tasks?
  • Who is best suited to take the lead on this?
  • How long will this task take?
  • Do we have a deadline?

Flowmine's Task list works well for this type of initial analysis. It allows you to filter out an initial data set, which you then can work your way through with the Save and edit next task function.

With the tasks properly analyzed and estimated, we have come a long way. The next natural step is to prioritize and rank the tasks, and a great place to start is by utilizing Flowmine's Auto-ranking function.

It computes a priority value based on the input you provided during the analysis, and then it tries to make an educated guess about the ranking.

While the result probably won't be 100% accurate, it is a good starting point for the manual ranking.