What Is Collaborative Task Management?

Collaborative task management helps teams ensure that planned tasks and activities run smoothly with proper systems and tools. It entails following specific guidelines and rules to plan, execute, and monitor organizational goals.

Collaborative task management involves:

Breaking projects into tasks and activities
Assigning them to team members
Monitoring progress
Adhering to a schedule to ensure success

Each task should have a title, description, start date, and end date to communicate its place within a project or process. Tasks may also include additional details such as task owner, subtasks, and dependencies. They may be compiled in a list view, table view, timeline, or calendar view, showing how the project flows and each task is to be completed.

Why is collaborative task management important?

Collaborative task management makes it easy to plan and execute distributed and complex projects and other ongoing operational activities. Project managers and teams agree on a process and procedures to coordinate the workflow and ensure there are no gaps, conflicts, or unmitigated risks.

This significantly improves productivity and harmony amongst teams and collaborators. It provides structure and clarity, giving team members a shared view of all moving parts of a collaborative project, workflow, or process, even when working from various locations.

Collaborative task management, using project management methodologies like Agile and Scrum, ensure teams stay on track by sharing daily updates and organizing regular Sprint reviews. This helps them react quickly to any needed project changes or requirements and keeps everyone updated on each other's work.

The difference between collaborative task management and project management

Task management is a part of project management, and they share many similarities. The major difference between collaborative task management and collaborative project management is:

Task management can be an ongoing process. The tasks and activities involved are not tied to any particular project and instead are often aligned with organizational goals and operations.

On the other hand, project management focuses on projects with a start date and an end date. Projects may be recurring, meaning that teams have to do them the same way more than once, but each project would have its own start and end dates. Projects have precise deliverables to signal successful completion.

Collaborative task management tools

There are many free and paid task management tools available online, making online collaboration and remote work more straightforward. Collaborative task management tools make it easy to plan and execute distributed and complex projects without breaking the bank or losing track of moving parts.

The best collaborative task management tools have the following features to make task management seamless:

Multiple task views, e.g., lists and Gantt charts
Instant messaging and chats
File upload and sharing
Cloud-based storage
Mobile applications

Wrike's task management software makes managing tasks easy and efficient with specific use-case templates and a secure, accessible, centralized workspace for teams to plan, execute, and track any number of tasks. Begin streamlining your tasks with a two-week free trial.

Rachael Kealy

Rachael is a Content Marketing Manager at Wrike. She has more than a decade of experience writing about every industry, from energy to entrepreneurship. She spent many years as a food writer and still loves nothing more than exploring new culinary experiences. Her passions are wide-ranging, including the themes of collaborative working, artificial intelligence, and the future of work.

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What Is Collaborative Task Management?