Best Task Management Software in 2024

What is Task Management Software? 

Task management software is used by organizations to manage and schedule tasks, track task progress, provide task estimates in terms of time and cost and track dependencies. Task management tools also help with task scheduling, prioritization and defining the workflow.

With the help of task management software, both in-office and remote teams can work in a collaborative manner with file sharing and real-time chat facility. All your team members can work on a single file simultaneously to ensure high productivity and timely project completion.

What Does Task Management Software Do

Every project requires meticulous planning. Tools like task management software helps in tracking a project's status and assist with efficient resource management, task planning and documentation. 

• Assign and organize tasks, their budget and workflow 
• Helps with project estimation & scheduling 
• You can also track dependencies to prevent bottlenecks 
• Allows for real-time collaboration through integrated communication tools 
• Makes it easy to upload files for further viewing, editing or sharing 
• Provides project templates that can be customized to suit your business requirement. 

Most Common Features of Task Management Software 

Task management tools are critical resources for organizing your work pattern. The best features that ensure this include: 

Task planning: Task management tools help break down your work into simpler task sets so that you can prioritize them as per your business requirements.

Task editing: Task tracking software lets you determine the tasks that need editing through estimated inflation or schedule overruns. These are required for process improvement as well as making it possible for collaborators to add comments and undertake discussions.

Visual planning: Online tools for project management support task boards and GANTT view for not just assigning tasks and checking iterations but also tracking releases, tasks and milestones along a project timeline.

Document management: Online task managers help with organizing documents into folders and categories as well as putting meta-tags. The software helps with quick and easy document sharing.

Timecard submission: Task management tools help keep a track of the amount of time spent by a team member on any specific task. This is necessary for improving task delivery and meeting deadlines.

Expanded task view: Online task manager offers this advanced feature in the form of an expanded task view for outlining subtasks, creating to-do lists and attaching time logs. This helps teams reach their targeted task goals.

Resource management: Task management systems help with the allocation of resources across teams. based on teh requirement of a task/project. It also helps in calculating their usage cost.

Recurring tasks: Tasks like updating timesheets need to be done in a periodic manner. Task software is great for looking after such recurring tasks that need to be performed without any fail.

Agile workflow system: Task management systems help achieve higher flexibility and productivity with agile workflows. The technique ensures smoother workflows and transparency.

Task prioritization: Task management systems help prioritize tasks by creating sets and subsets to ensure timely completion. You can set task priorities based on dependencies.

Collaboration: Task management system helps share fields, exchange information and collaborate on a project in real-time.

Time tracking: With task tracking software, you can evaluate the time spent on each task and its impact on the overall project. This feature is important for project cost estimation.

Reporting: Reports are generated at regular intervals to assess the success of any project. Also, the contribution of every team member can be assessed and evaluated.

5 Benefits of Task Management Software  

1. Setting project milestones & dependencies: With the help of task tracking tools, you can define project dependencies, and the path for achieving the result. It also helps in setting milestones and ensure that the project is progressing as per the schedule.

2. Third-party integrations: Task management software often integrates with collaboration solutions, employee tracking solutions, and other such tools to ensure better performance.

3. Manage every project from one platform: You get a single platform to manage multiple projects simultaneously. With the help of notes, calendars and cards, all project related milestones can be achieved.

4. Quick access to data: Task management tools provide quick, authorized access to data related to any project anytime and from anywhere.

5. Increased productivity: With workflows and dependencies defined and critical paths shared, completing tasks and projects on time is easy. Also, employees achieve higher productivity with better collaboration.

6. Distribute workloads & delegate tasks: Task management software helps with uniform work distribution and delegation of sub tasks. This is an important feature for managers to ensure that projects are in progress as per the plan.

Task Management Software Trends in 2021 

The latest trends indicate how the field of project management is constantly innovating with various new features and ideas for improving the task management landscape. 

AI & Automation: Businesses have been leveraging artificial intelligence for task automation and data management purposes. In-depth insights and data visualization are other good examples of AI being utilized for managing tasks.

Further, AI that has been assisting organizations undertake risk estimation for setting project costs, progress and duration.

Gartner study indicated how AI augmentation would generate a business value of 2.9 trillion in 2021 and help businesses recover a total of around six billion hours of employee productivity.

The AI-based task management software has also reduced dependency on human input for handling work schedules, follow-ups and reminders. The centralized system for storing information has made the handling of complex tasks easy.

Hybrid approach to task management: With the hybrid project management approach, businesses are combining the best of traditional and agile methodologies. While agile methodologies are based on flexible task schedules, the traditional approach to task management is based on pre-defined steps and methodologies.

The hybrid approach to task management is based on the focus on inclusion. Diverse project management ideas are considered with the help of task management software to find the most suitable path to task completion.

Collaborating on projects remotely: Online task managers came to the rescue when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and companies had to adopt the work from the home setup. There has been an increased demand for online or cloud based task management tools that support document sharing and real-time collaboration between remote teams.

Both SMBs and big enterprises are preferring cloud-based task management tools for remote teams fto ensure smooth collaboration, file sharing and task planning.

Key Considerations to Purchase Task Management Tools 

Task management software is required to keep a track of tasks' timeline, performance and budgeting. The following are the important considerations to be kept in view before buying one. 

Identifying pain points: This requires you to have complete knowledge about what exactly your company's requirements are. Do you want to track a project's performance, perform task planning, check the team's task schedules or manage just the documents? Once clear about your expectations from a project management software, choose a system which offers all these features. 

Easy to use: Online tools for project management need to be easy to use and implement. Else, your team would spend unnecessary time on understanding the features.  

Scalability: The best task management system is the one that provides scalable features. As your business grows and you start taking multiple projects, you will need the software that ensures scalability.  

Organization size: The task management requirements of a start-up are different from a company that is large or well established. You must get the software's demo and get a clearer picture is a task management tool is apt for your business requirements.  

Industry type: Understand whether the solution is based on industry-specific methodology or agile development. 

Collaboration tools: Task management software with advanced collaboration tools make it easy for teams to collaborate and work together on a project. Equally essential is the file-sharing option here. 

Delivery options: Check whether the deployment of a task management software is cloud based or on premise. While some businesses prefer on-premise task management software to ensure better control over data, other opt for cloud-based task management tools for cost-effective subscription.