DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF TASK
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND
TO THE STUDY
In every business environment, the timeline to execute various tasks
assigned to employee is paramount towards ensuring the efficiency of the
organization. According to Wikipedia, Task is defined as an activity that needs
to be accomplished within a defined period of time or by a deadline. It is any
piece of work that is undertaken or attempted by an individual or
group of person as a workflow. In addition,
a task is conceived as a very cogent factor affecting human being’s behavior in
social psychology and organizational management. The manual process of delegating
task to different employee in a business environment requires that interaction
exist between employees. The life cycle of a task started from when a task is
assigned, approved, on hold, rejected, and completed by an employee. An
employee being assigned to a task is expected to report the progress status of
the task to the initiator of the task. The main bottleneck of the traditional
mode of assigning task is on how to manage task through its entire life cycle.
An illustration is when an employee is assigned to different tasks by different
employee with each task having their respective deadline. Such an employee
faces the challenges of how to judiciously execute those tasks to meet
deadline. Challenge of which task is to give a high priority when performing
various tasks, task that is close to deadline, the current state of the each
task as well as interactions that occur on tasks involving several people
within the confinement of an organization. In addition, it will be very tedious
for managers to generate several reports on tasks to be performed.
Also, the rapid growth of social business applications created a new
set of demands on employees’ time and attention. As employees engage in tasks
or in projects with information that spans across various activities, it
becomes a great challenge for an employee to stay organized and know which of
the activities requires an attention. A new type of tool is needed, one that
combines the collaborative features of social networking software with the organizational
and task features of project management software.
Most importantly, the computing paradigm is now geared towards
ubiquitous computing (computing any where anytime). Although, task management
as a matter of fact is not a new concept, but many of the methods and tools
that are use in this modern time in organizations were developed long time ago
and they did not have the collaborative characteristics that are common and
required in today’s enterprise social networking platforms. These legacy tools
suffer from a variety of shortcomings that can impede the successful completion
of a project. The research work was carried out to design and implement a task
management system that will augment task/project management features, such as
task delegation, handling task priorities by their due dates with some modern
social networking features such as adding of comments and sharing of files,
enabling people to work together more efficiently. There are various
architecture platforms available for developing and implementing task
management, the architecture used in this research is web based architecture.
The task management system developed in this research were implemented for
Federal University Technology of Minna (FUTMINNA), to improve the way employee
get their work done by helping employees organize their tasks and collaborate
efficiently.
1.2 STATEMENT OF
THE PROBLEM
The problems generally associated with the traditional way of
assigning task are enormous. The problems are stated below.
i.
The main problem is how to
efficiently manage tasks so as to meet deadline that are associated with task.
ii.
Data integrity and security:
Security of data can be easily compromise; documents associated with different
task may be accessed by un-authorized personnel. Also personnel can give a
false report on the time a task is being assigned or to be completed.
iii.
In addition, organizing a team
to work effectively on a project can be so difficult. Team performing various
tasks belonging to a particular project cannot collaborate at a real time, they
have to schedule a meeting for that to be possible which would contribute to
longevity of time in completing a given task or project.
The above problems demand the development of this new information
system for the efficient management of tasks.
1.3
AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF STUDY
The aim of this project is to design and implement a web based Task
Management System that will improve the way employee get their work done by
helping employees organize their tasks and collaborate efficiently.
The objectives are stated below;
i.
To carry out an extensive
analysis on the workflow process of the Institution and explore the challenges
being faced by the system.
ii.
To design an application that
can easily create, assign and comment on tasks, so that an owner of task can
always know real time progress and who is performing it.
iii.
To ensure that teams ideas,
files and conversations are in a single location so that user can always know
the right place to locate information.
1.4
SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY
In business environment, the time to get work done is a
cogent factor towards ensuring productivity. Studies have shown that most
organizations deliver projects behind schedule date as a result of inefficient
management of task at hand. In this modern age where computing is becoming
ubiquitous, it behooves organization to have an information system that will
support the planning and management of task/project to be executed by their
employee.
Such Information System should provide a good platform
for team working on a project to collaborate effectively on a real time to
execute job seamlessly in lesser time.
Organization has a lot to benefit from implementing a
task management system. Apart from easy creation, allocation, and conversation
on task that will be provided by this application, organization will benefit
immensely from generating vital reports to aid decision making.
1.5
SCOPE OF STUDY
This project which will be a web based application will
handle issues related to planning and management of task and project within
FUTMINNA. It will be confined to creation of users by the administrator, online
task creation and assigning of task to employee, with detail task description
and provisions to upload and update files that may be needed for task. Deadline will be associated with task.
Collaboration will be possible through adding of comments among users that can
participate in a specific task. Team involve in a task will be updated on status
change on a particular task.
1.6
LIMITATIONS OF STUDY
Although this project is designed with mobile
connectivity in mind however, the mobile application interfacing with this
application is not developed. Also the
application does not include a conference or video calling integration. And
finally sub task is not handled as part of the
1.7
OPERATIONAL
DEFINITION OF TERMS
1.
Task: A piece of work to be performed or
attempted by an employee.
2.
Inward Task: Task involving employee of
a particular department in an organization.
3.
Outward Task: Task involving several
departments in an organization.
4.
Project: Work to be done that will
involve assigning tasks to different employee.
5.
Web Method: allows exchanging data with
remote servers using nothing but the operations of http.
6.
IIS: Internet Information Service (IIS)
is a web server for hosting Asp.Net application.
7.
Systems: An assemblage of interrelated
elements, which we find interesting to study, it could be a process, machine or program.
8.
Design: It is a detailed plan or
arrangement to achieve a particular purpose.
9.
Software: A program designed to perform
particular tasks.
10.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator is also
known as web address.
11.
Metadata: Data that describes other
data. Data that provides information about one or more aspects of the data.