Improve Teams Tasks

[penfold]

I have posted a few topics on here recently about trying to improve our way of working. One of the things we have implemented is Tasks in teams which has proven to be much better than what we had (which wasn't hard as it was just random email rubbish). Anyway, after 4 weeks of using tasks to track what work is/needs to be done I have noticed that we are starting to get a big bucket full of "To-do" and a bigger bucket of "closed" tasks. So this has me thinking, has anyone used tasks to track issues that they are working on, and do you have any recommendation for using this long term? We have the following set up.

 

To Do>In progress>In Review>Completed. We also have an on-hold, but this is really not used. We do not currently use any labels and I am now thinking if we should be doing something else to make better use of tasks?

 

Anyone currently use Teams tasks with good results or got any suggestions?

[TechMonkey]

Depends on your work flow. Is everything in To-Do an agreed task or things people put in there? In the past I created a Blue-Sky/Future bucket to put tasks that we would like to do but no capacity at the moment, but you could adjust this to an input bucket, then when a job is agreed moved to To-Do. You could have a "needs input" bucket for people to move a task to and assign a senior team member to look and respond.

 

The only use I have found for labels is for sorting, so I used it for assigning to certain school holidays so I could see what was coming up. I've seen it used as a way to categorise tasks but I never found this useful as if it is to-do then it doesn't matter if it is hardware, software or network.

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Currently everything is dumped into the To-Do list as it comes "into our heads" but nothing is assigned to anyone until the task has a clear definition and checklists associated with it. Before we assign tasks to anyone we have a meeting to agree that they understand what is required and agree that they can do it in 2 weeks. We set 2 weeks as a default time line for tasks so that they were small enough to we were able to see progress and big enough that we didn't spend more time creating the task than actually doing the work.

 

I like the idea of an "input bucket" and a "needs input" also as I think this could be useful for just getting ideas down without needing to plan what to do. I guess this can keep the actual working tasks separated from the ideas?

 

Thanks