In traditional project management, creating and managing tasks and milestone(s)  is one of the primary responsibilities of the project manager (PM).

With the input (hopefully) from his / her team, the PM creates a project plan, has weekly meetings to get status reports and then the project manager updates the project plan.

The project manager is also a messenger or liaison between the development team and the executive management team. It is a thankless job, but somebody has to do it.

The job of Project manager is changing with the availability of online project management software and the addition of real-time collaboration tools to project management applications.

The PM job is not to collect information and update the plans anymore. Now the PM can do a lot more in the project and instead of managing papers do actual productive work.

For example, instead of PM gathering the tasks’ status, team members update the status of their own tasks. Also when something is changed in the project, the PM is notified automatically by instant notification.

When the PM assigns a new task to a project member, the project member is notified automatically too. The software manages creation and tracking of tasks including comments and communication related to the project.

This makes PM’s job to solve problems rather than hunting information to figure out if there are problems lurking in the shadows o the project!

How do task and milestone work?

In Binfire, a milestone is an instant in time when something happens, it is a goal, like a review or a demo. The due date for the milestone is set by the task’s that it depends on to make it happen.

A task which has subtasks in it is a container. Its start and due dates are set by it subtasks. The start of a container tasks is the earliest start date of its subtasks. The due date of a container tasks is the latest due date of its subtasks.

This enforces top-down design on project management process. You first define the goals (milestones) and wire these milestones to each other using dependencies.  For example, a task or milestone can start only when another task or milestone which it depends on is finished.

The next step is to break large tasks to smaller subtasks. Again the user can connect these subtasks to each other using dependencies. This enables the creation of very complex projects using the top-down method.

All tasks could be commented on and stared! When an object is stared, any change will prompt a notification to those who follow it! This makes project collaboration a reality for any team, regardless where they are located.

Happy Collaboration!