18 March 2009 | Freelancing Tips, Newsletter, Outsourcing Tips | Jacqui

A new feature coming in the next few weeks inspires us to discuss a key technique for project management. It’s relevant to any kind of remote work, but at oDesk the ideas grew out of managing software development workteams. Our co-founder and CTO Odysseas Tsatalos is a firm believer in breaking the development process down to the smallest tasks, and our new task code feature will let buyers and project managers who adopt the technique to more accurately track the time and costs dedicated to each task. So for those inspired by the new feature, we offer eight tips that can make you a better manager:

1. Think small: Break a larger assignment down to manageable tasks. Each takes a few hours—sometimes, a few days, but the larger the task, the harder it is to manage and track, so break things down as far as logic allows. Examples from an engineering environment: “Add landing page to production trunk,” “update the What’s New section on homepage,” or “add fields to database.”
    
2. Go high level: Keep your task description (or codes) to a high-level concept. This way, your reports will be more meaningful. Example: “Write a newsletter article,” “Edit the newsletter” and “Format and email the newsletter” may be tasks for three different providers, but they form a “Newsletter” component owned by your marketing manager. When reviewing the communication efforts at the end of the month, your reports will immediately show how much effort was spent on the newsletter.
    
3. Automate: Tasks should be automatically queued to their correct owners. There are many project management tools available to do that; these days we’re using Bugzilla, which is available in every team room. What system you use isn’t as important as finding one that works for you.
    
4. One thing at a time: Tell providers to devote 100 percent of their time to completing one given task at a time; don’t let them shift among three tasks you’ve assigned them. We find that if a provider focuses on one task at a time, each item gets done faster and better.
    
5. From the top: A provider should do the task at the front of her queue, move to the next, then to any recurring back-burner task once all priority tasks are completed.
    
6. Keep it moving: We have project architects pushing tasks, while development managers are responsible for keeping everybody’s queue full. However you do it, make sure that tasks are being generated and distributed correctly.
    
7. Pay attention: With oDesk’s new Task Code feature, create a set of codes for each task and instruct your providers to select the correct code when they sign in with their work memo. This will let you generate reports that can show you, among other things, how much of your resources go to each kind of task.
    
8. Evolve: With that data, refine the process to perfection.
    

There are a lot of ways to efficiently manage your workteams and to organize the tasks you assign them. We’re hoping that the upcoming Task Code tool will be one more way you (and your team) get the job done.