COR is more than a software where our projects, tasks and hours are tracked. The platform can help us to organize our work and our team's work, making us more efficient and enhancing everyone's work.
To get the most out of the platform, we give the following recommendations:
Organize the work of the team quickly and easily
Among the challenges of planning a project, the organization of the tasks to be executed by our team is one of the greatest difficulties when it comes to assigning responsibilities. How does the assignment of an urgent task affect the rest of the work to be done by one person? What happens if the delivery date of a task is changed? Who has too many pending tasks assigned and who can help you?
These questions are easily solved with the help of COR's interactive Gantt. Within this Gantt we can gain visibility over the planning of the work done, the status of the tasks and the availability of each of our collaborators.
We recommend using the filter 'View: Biweekly' to have predictability about the work to be done in the next 15 days. Also, it is a good practice to hold planning meetings with the team on Mondays, where tasks will be distributed and assigned, being a good opportunity to make time estimations.
Use the 'Teams' filter to better organize the Gantt and distribute tasks by specific areas. By clicking on the user, the daily availability graph will be displayed, so you can know in advance if this person has time available or not.
It links tasks together, so that when a delivery date is changed, the other tasks will be affected and it will be possible to anticipate changes in other projects or tasks for another client.
Use COR for task follow-up
One of our greatest responsibilities is to ensure that we meet the delivery dates agreed with our customers. To this end, it is important that we are aware of the development of each task, being able to foresee and act on unforeseen events or errors in time estimates.
The tracking can be done from the Gantt, filtering by Team or Collaborator and seeing the status of the tasks by their color. However, we recommend reinforcing this tracking by using the task list and applying the Team, Collaborator, Client, Deadline, Status filters. This will allow us to see the tasks that are of our interest and thus to carry out our follow-up, without having to interrupt the work of a person to consult on the state of a job.
We recommend using the following combination of filters as a basis: 'Type: Created by me' and 'Deadline', choosing the next 2 weeks, this will allow us to see the status of all the earrings we have assigned and track them accordingly.
Be aware of Completed and Suspended tasks
Completed and Suspended tasks are important, as they are the instances where our intervention is required. Suspended tasks usually indicate some difficulty in continuing with the development of the task, so it is an opportunity to offer help or intervene in the resolution of the problem. Finished tasks require us to supervise their correct execution and determine if it is necessary to generate a Rework (to indicate adjustments requested internally or by the client) or to file the task in order to keep the platform organized.
To do this we suggest using, in the Task List, the filters 'Type: Created by me' and 'Status: Suspended or Finished' as appropriate. Note: Remember that the 'Active' filter determines that we only see tasks that have not been archived.
Estimating the working time of tasks
Making estimates of the time it takes to complete a task, allows for better planning of the team's work, since it prevents us from overloading a person with work (with the use of User Capacity) and then allows us to contrast with the time that the task actually took, thus being able to learn from the team's times and give better delivery dates to the client.
Estimates can be made in different ways, however, we recommend that they are agreed between the PM and the Collaborator, reaching a consensus on how long a task will take. If you wish to use more technical knowledge, there is a widely used formula, where a Pessimistic time, a Realistic time and an Optimistic time are established, applying then the formula (4R+P+O)/6. Note: estimates are just that, estimates, they serve as reference and learning, not as a time limit or benchmark.