SharePoint project management may be eating away your working time if not utilizing the OOTB SharePoint options, like task management templates, or specially designed third-party tools. The smart approach to this issue can incredibly shorten the whole project planning and production cycle.
In this blogpost, we will highlight some basic features of SharePoint task management.
SharePoint Personal Site
A personal site in SharePoint is the easiest way to keep tracking your tasks and manage them from within one place. You can see an aggregate view of all tasks assigned to you across the entire SharePoint farm, regardless of where a task resides. You can edit a task by clicking on it and being redirected to the site or SharePoint task list, that contains this task.
A timeline view allows you to display certain tasks in a Gantt chart style view, the most popular view for SharePoint task management. This is a convenient way to represent task list sequentially as tasks, subtasks, and milestones with dates. Also, you can designate specific colors and text styles to your tasks.
You can display your tasks in a timeline view by editing the web part properties and checking the “Show timeline” box in the web part settings.
Among the other SharePoint task management options available with personal sites are the following:
- Click the checkbox to mark the task as completed.
- Click the exclamation point to mark the task as important.
- Make a task personal (visible to you only).
Project Site in SharePoint
A SharePoint project site displays every team member’s tasks so that one can view the workflows’ load and status across the whole team. There you might select a view according to your SharePoint project requirements. There available some default view types for a task list: Calendar, Completed, Gantt chart, Late Tasks, and others.
On a SharePoint Project site, you can manage your tasks or other users’ tasks in case you have the relevant permission. A useful option for SharePoint task management is the ability to create subtasks. This is an essential option if you want to display and track a large multi-stage project with many tasks.
Microsoft Project
If your SharePoint task management requires more flexibility, you can import a SharePoint task list to Microsoft Project by clicking the “Open with Project” option in the ribbon.
However, the SharePoint task list will be opened in Microsoft Project outside your SharePoint site. In case you want to perform your SharePoint task management in the SharePoint environment only, you have to search for other tools that enhance the default SharePoint abilities.
Microsoft Planner
Microsoft Planner for Office 365 is a sort of a “SharePoint Trello” solution. The planner utilizes a similar, but simplified structure to manage a SharePoint online task list. You create a plan, which is represented as a board with custom columns. Later on, you can rearrange the SharePoint tasks into buckets.
MS PLanner tasks can be categorized by status or by assigned users. The users assigned to a task receive email notifications. One of the remarkable features of this SharePoint task management tool is the possibility to leave comments and have a conversation with your co-workers right in the related task card.
Third-Party Solutions for SharePoint Task Management
SharePoint OOTB functionality is not enough sometimes to satisfy multiple requirements from a full-blown project. Specially designed Kanban software might be installed in SharePoint to extend the task management abilities.
Virtosoftware has developed Virto Kanban Board for smart SharePoint task management. This solution was created to support classic kanban methodology, though it is highly customizable to provide extra abilities for rather complex projects.
Virto SharePoint Kanban provides the same options as, e.g. Trello: SharePoint user notifications, custom columns, task comments, task activity tracking, and even more.
Virto Kanban Board is available for SharePoint Online and the on-premises versions.
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