How to Conduct an Efficient Task Planning?

Setting goals is key, because if we want to deliver the app in less than two months, we'll have no choice but to bring in more staff.

These are issues that touch on the subsequent management and distribution of work tasks, so this is the first thing to clarify.

After defining the goals, you are ready to follow the four key steps to properly manage and assign tasks.

Step 1: Split the Project into Tasks and Prioritize Them

With your goals in mind, divide the project into tasks and subtasks so that you can prioritize them.

There are various task scheduling tools to help you out.

Cutting with the right granularity: the WBS structure

Before prioritizing, break down the project down to estimable, assignable tasks one by one: this is the Project Breakdown Structure (WBS). A practical rule sets the limit at five man-days per task. Beyond that, the task hides too much uncertainty and risks being underestimated; Too thin, it multiplies the monitoring work without gaining precision.

Eisenhower's Matrix

This system help you categorize urgent and important tasks, distinguishing quality and time constraints.

The Eisenhower matrix has four spaces to order your project tasks.

• Important and urgent tasks : In this box are tasks that need to be completed immediately and that usually arise from unforeseen events in daily life. To go back to the previous example, the absence of one of the programmers and the need to do the work assigned to him before this eventuality.
• Important but non-urgent tasks: These are long-term tasks that can be postponed.
• Unimportant but urgent tasks : These are matters that can be delegated to other team members or that need to be automated.
• Tasks that are neither important nor urgent : therefore, they could be eliminated, because they waste our time.

The PERT method

The PERT chart is another tool for effectively dividing a project into tasks.

It consists of sets of actions that are related to each other. It is especially useful in projects where tasks depend on different departments or large teams.

It unifies criteria and tightens relationships to ensure that tasks are executed correctly and smoothly, in the planned order and with priority given to delivery dates.

Its depiction is reminiscent of a relay race, where worker "B" cannot start running until worker "A" has completed the task assigned to him.

The ICE rating

The ICE (Impact, Confidence, Easy) scoring model is another methodology that evaluates tasks based on three parameters, which helps prioritize the most important tasks.

The following aspects are scored from 1 to 10:

• Impact: chat is the objective of the task, with 1 being a low impact and 10 being a high impact (crucial task).
• Trust: the certainty that the expected impact of the task will be achieved. A value of 1 is a task that we don't trust a lot of, and a value of 10 is a value of proven tasks that we know will have the desired impact.
• Ease : The degree of ease of the task, taking into account the constraints of time, resources, costs, etc. The easier the task, the higher the score.

The ICE score for each task will be the result of multiplying the values given for impact, confidence, and ease. The highest output will designate the priority order of tasks.

The MosCow Method

The MoSCoW method is a task prioritization technique used in agile management.

It classifies the requirements of a task into four categories.

1. Must haves ,
2. Should have (important but not critical),
3. Could have (optional) and
4. Won't have (not a priority for now).

With a more concrete example, in an application development project, user authentication could be a Must have, while a dark mode would be a Should have and compatibility with a connected watch a Won't have.

Prioritize by Billable Milestone and Critical Path

These methods order the tasks, but in a fixed-price mission one criterion is the most important criterion: the billable milestone. A task that unlocks an invoice or is on the critical path (the longest chain of dependent tasks, the one that sets the end date) takes precedence over a task that is useful but has no effect on delivery. Deferring a task from the critical path shifts the delivery, and the billing milestone with it.

Step 2: Identify Available Human Resource

The second step is to properly plan the human resources available, taking into account three aspects:

• their skills,
• their availability,
• their appetites.

Verify Skills

At this stage, make sure that the staff has the necessary skills to execute a given project.

It's important to keep in mind that these aren't just technical issues. Depending on the project, soft skills can be just as relevant.

For example, in projects involving multiple departments, it will be necessary to verify that participants have negotiation, empathy, or communication skills. These skills will be necessary to carry out the project.

Check Availability and Monitor Workload

An often neglected point is the verification of the availability of resources, especially in companies that have several projects in progress and profiles involved in several of them.

It is essential to ensure that we have the right developer to execute a given development, and that he will actually be available when we need him.

This involves checking any paternity or maternity leave, holidays, scheduled absences, etc. This will include reorganizing tasks or finding a replacement when the person initially assigned is not available.

In a practice or IT Services, the availability displayed is not the actual availability: the same consultant often works on several assignments. Before assigning a task, also look at the inter-contract for competent profiles that are still available.

To properly manage staff resources and make the best decisions, you need to rely on a resource planning software like Stafiz. With these type of tools, you can:

With these types of tools, you will be able to:

• quickly and easily visualize workloads,
• analyse at a glance whether the various tasks are completed on time,
• see who is responsible for each task,
• track the progress of each task,
• accelerate decision-making and reorient the project if objectives need to be changed,
• set realistic goals for each task and for the project as a whole,
• control overtaking by warning systems ,
• keep real-time updated data of work in progress,
• reassign profiles and employees with agility, if necessary.

With a project managing tool, it is possible to quickly find profiles with the skills we need.

Assess Engagement

This is a matter of staff management : is the team motivated and are the conditions right for the project participants to be 100% committed?

To improve employee motivation and maximize employee engagement, the first step is to ensure that they have the necessary skills to complete the tasks.

When an employee feels confident, his or her involvement in the projects is greater. If they doesn't have the right qualification level, it is worthwhile to train them within the company.

In this way, they will perceive that the organization cares about them and provides them with the necessary resources to do their jobs, which enriches them professionally.

You can then make it a point of honor to consider the preferences of professionals in the distribution of tasks.

To maintain high levels of drive and involvement, there's no secret: you need to share workloads fairly.

In this respect, it's essential to anticipate future needs by using analyses to predict which teams will be busier or less busy, redistributing tasks to other employees if necessary.

Step 3: Assign Project Tasks

Once your project has been broken down into tasks and your human and technical resources have been identified, you can move on to the third step: task assignment.

To do this, assign the following information to each of the tasks that make up the project.

• Who will be responsible?
• How long will it take and when will the task for which he is responsible have to be ready?
• What tools will it be used to carry out?

Task assignment can be performed and represented in different ways.

GANTT: a Well Known Breakdown Chart

This task scheduler is a system of bars occupying a certain time space.

In a GANTT chart, you'll see at a glance:

• the name of the task,
• the estimated time for its execution,
• the person responsible for the task,
• interdependence with other tasks.

Use a Staff Table

The staff table also allows you to quickly visualize the professionals involved in a project, the tasks assigned to them, and the estimated time to complete them.

Both in the GANTT chart and in the staff tables, workloads of the available profiles are displayed.

Sometimes, depending on how the project evolves, it may be necessary to balance these workloads for proper project development.

Balancing Workloads

The utilization rate is the indicator that allows workloads to be measured and balanced in a fair way, without jeopardizing the objectives and deadlines set for the execution of a project.

The utilization rate is equal to the time spent on billable projects divided by the available time. If an employee works 5 hours a day on billable projects out of a total of 7 hours in their workday, their utilization rate for this day will be: 5 / 7 * 100 = 71.42%.

By knowing the utilization rate of all project members, you can make better decisions about task organization, scheduling, etc.

The billable utilization rate also allows you to organize costs according to the actual time spent by each person and optimize the time planned for each task, thus ensuring the continuity of the project.

Read at the task level, this rate indicates whether the assignment remains profitable: a task entrusted to an already saturated profile slips, a task entrusted to an under-occupied profile costs more than it brings in.

With a resource planning, you have up-to-date data on the entire team, taking into account staff leave, days of absence or illness, whether they work full-time or part-time, etc.

Thanks to all this, resources will be better distributed, enabling overloads to be avoided or potential mismatches to be detected before they even occur. This will have a positive effect on the overall development of a project.

Step 4: Tasks Execution Monitoring

Once all the resources have been allocated according to the objectives, it's time to track the tasks themselves.

As we have seen, planning is key. But sometimes unforeseen events occur that require changes or modifications to the initial planning.

Detecting unforeseen events in time, or even anticipating them, is the main purpose of this phase. The use of a project monitoring tool is very useful because it allows:

• automatic alerts when certain tasks are not completed on time and in the right way,
• act quickly if changes need to be implemented in the event of unforeseen events,
• the proper coordination of resources to achieve objectives,
• detect bottlenecks in certain tasks that delay the development of other necessary actions,
• readjust workloads in real time, promoting worker motivation, productivity and ensuring that the project is executed according to the planned parameters,
• detect deviations in the budget, control subcontracting costs or non-billable costs,
• Streamline communication between all team members.

From task to margin: time entry closes the loop

A planned task only becomes a management tool if the time actually spent is entered in front of it. The chain then closes: provisional planning, tasks, time entry, profitability. Without time entry, a service company compares the cost of a task with what it has invoiced only at the time of invoicing, too late to react.

Case study

Altai Consulting is a consulting firm with 105 employees in France.

Before Stafiz, time tracking and project indicators lived in two separate systems, reconsolidated by hand in Excel. The team wasted time consolidating and management decisions were slowed down due to a lack of up-to-date project data.

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Stafiz is very project-oriented and particularly suitable for consulting firms, as it breaks down information by task and man-days.

Giang Huong Huynh
Operations & Financial Manager

Since the deployment of Stafiz, Altai's project managers have been reading the margin and burn rate in real time, without going back to Excel: time tracking and project indicators live in a single platform.