Prioritizing and risk management with Project Collaboration

One of the major goals of Project Collaboration is ensuring that all teams are on the same page. And that also means that everyone must know which tasks need to be tackled first and which tasks carry a risk.

First, we’ll take a look at 7 different ways to prioritize tasks in Project Collaboration. Then we’ll have a quick look at how you can flag tasks as a (potential) risk.

7 different ways to prioritize tasks

Prioritizing tasks in the “List” or “Board” view of a project, or in the “Multiple projects” view:

1. Priority field

On task level, there is a Priority field, which provides 3 options: “High”, “Medium” and “Low”. High-priority tasks are indicated with a red exclamation mark and yellow background, while low-priority tasks are indicated with a blue “downwards arrow” icon. You can also sort the task list on priority.

2. SLA level

The SLA level field is available for the task types “DIS Issue”, “Driver Issue”, “Software Issue”, and “Support”, and can be set to “n/a”, “1”, “2” or “3” according to the urgency of the task.

3. Latest delivery date

The Latest delivery date field is available for the task types “New Software Feature” and “Software Issue”. It can be used to indicate by which date a software release needs to be available for a certain software task.

4. Business value

You can attribute a business value to every task. The “Sort by Value” filter will then sort the task list by the business value assigned to the tasks.

5. Sorting & filtering

The sorting and filtering options offer you more possibilities to narrow down your personalized view in line with your priorities.

Extended priority options with the support of your assigned project’s deploy squad:

6. Labels

Every task can have one or multiple labels: e.g. labels can be used to visualize the different phases of a project or a more specific range of priorities going beyond the 3 standard priorities (high, medium and low). Furthermore, you can filter the task list on these labels.

7. Due date

You can fill in a due date for each task, and the task list can be sorted by due date.

Risk management

Project Collaboration is also the central place to keep track of a project’s detractors register, which lists items that potentially are or can become a project risk.

A few examples of typical detractors that can be encountered during a DataMiner project are:

• Remote access constraints
• Unavailability of test and validation products or a representative end-to-end testing infrastructure
• Lengthy process of several IT requests to open up access from the DMA to the products in scope of the project
• Vendor API unavailability, issues or breaking changes

A recent and often undiscovered new feature that Project Collaboration holds as an auxiliary in this is the project risk flag. Open up a task and hover over the area on the right-hand side of the task title: now a flag will appear!

To flag a task as a project risk, simply click on the flag and save this change.

In the “List” view and “Board” view, all tasks flagged as project risks are proceeded by a red flag icon. Of course, it is also possible to filter tasks on project risk.