CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
In every business environment, the timeline to execute various tasks assigned to the employee is paramount towards ensuring the efficiency of the organization. According to Wikipedia, Task is defined as an activity that needs to be accomplished within a defined period of time or by a deadline. It is any piece of work that is undertaken or attempted by an individual or group of a person as a workflow. In addition, a task is conceived as a very cogent factor affecting human being’s behavior in social psychology and organizational management. The manual process of delegating the task to the different employee in a business environment requires that interaction exists between employees. The life cycle of a task started from when a task is assigned, approved, on hold, rejected, and completed by an employee. An employee being assigned to a task is expected to report the progress status of the task to the initiator of the task. The main bottleneck of the traditional model of assigning tasks is on how to manage tasks through its entire life cycle. An illustration is when an employee is assigned to different tasks by different employees with each task having their respective deadline. Such an employee faces the challenges of how to judiciously execute those tasks to meet the deadline. Challenge of which task is to give a high priority when performing various tasks, a task that is close to the deadline, the current state of each task as well as interactions that occur on tasks involving several people within the confinement of an organization. In addition, it will be very tedious for managers to generate several reports on tasks to be performed. Also, the rapid growth of social business applications created a new set of demands on employees’ time and attention. As employees engage in tasks or in projects with information that spans across various activities, it becomes a great challenge for an employee to stay organized and know which of the activities requires attention. A new type of tool is needed, one that combines the collaborative features of social networking software with the organizational and task features of project management software. Most importantly, the computing paradigm is now geared towards ubiquitous computing (computing anywhere anytime). Although task management, as a matter of fact, is not a new concept, many of the methods and tools that are used in this modern time in organizations were developed a long time ago and they did not have the collaborative characteristics that are common and required in today’s enterprise social networking platforms. These legacy tools suffer from a variety of shortcomings that can impede the successful completion of a project. The research work was carried out to design and implement a task management system that will augment task/project management features, such as task delegation, handling task priorities by their due dates with some modern social networking features such as adding of comments and sharing of files, enabling people to work together more efficiently. There are various architecture platforms available for developing and implementing task management, the architecture used in this research is web-based architecture. The task management system developed in this research were implemented for Federal University Technology of Minna (FUTMINNA), to improve the way employee get their work done by helping employees organize their tasks and collaborate efficiently.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The problems generally associated with the traditional way of assigning tasks are enormous. The problems are stated below.
i. The main problem is how to efficiently manage tasks so as to meet the deadline that are associated with the task.
ii. Data integrity and security: Security of data can be easily compromised; documents associated with the different tasks may be accessed by unauthorized personnel. Also, personnel can give a false report on the time a task is being assigned or to be completed.
iii. In addition, organizing a team to work effectively on a project can be so difficult. The team performing various tasks belonging to a particular project cannot collaborate in real-time, they have to schedule a meeting for that to be possible which would contribute to the longevity of time in completing a given task or project. The above problems demand the development of this new information system for the efficient management of tasks.
1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF STUDY
The aim of this project is to design and implement a web-based Task Management System that will improve the way employees get their work done by helping employees organize their tasks and collaborate efficiently.
The objectives are stated below;
i. To carry out an extensive analysis of the workflow process of the Institution and explore the challenges being faced by the system.
ii. To design an application that can easily create, assign and comment on tasks, so that an owner of the task can always know real-time progress and who is performing it.
iii. To ensure that teams’ ideas, files, and conversations are in a single location so that the user can always know the right place to locate information.
1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY
In a business environment, the time to get work done is a cogent factor towards ensuring productivity. Studies have shown that most organizations deliver projects behind schedule dates as a result of inefficient management of task at hand. In this modern age where computing is becoming ubiquitous, it behooves an organization to have an information system that will support the planning and management of tasks/projects to be executed by its employees. Such Information systems should provide a good platform for a team working on a project to collaborate effectively in real-time to execute a job seamlessly in lesser time. Organization has a lot to benefit from implementing a task management system. Apart from easy creation, allocation, and conversation on a task that will be provided by this application, the organization will benefit immensely from generating vital reports to aid decision making.
1.5 SCOPE OF STUDY
This project which will be a web-based application will handle issues related to planning and management of tasks and projects within FUTMINNA. It will be confined to the creation of users by the administrator, online task creation and assigning of the task to an employee, with detail task description and provisions to upload and update files that may be needed for a task. The deadline will be associated with the task. The collaboration will be possible through adding comments among users that can participate in a specific task. Team involve in a task will be updated on status change on a particular task.
1.6 LIMITATIONS OF STUDY
Although this project is designed with mobile connectivity in mind however, the mobile application interfacing with this application is not developed. Also the application does not include a conference or video calling integration. And finally, the subtask is not handled as part of the
1.7 OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF TERMS
1. Task: A piece of work to be performed or attempted by an employee.
2. Inward Task: Task involving an employee of a particular department in an organization.
3. Outward Task: Task involving several departments in an organization.
4. Project: Work to be done that will involve assigning tasks to different employees.
5. Web Method: allows exchanging data with remote servers using nothing but the operations of Http.
6. IIS: Internet Information Service (IIS) is a web server for hosting Asp.Net application.
7. Systems: An assemblage of interrelated elements, which we find interesting to study, it could be a process, machine or program.
8. Design: It is a detailed plan or arrangement to achieve a particular purpose.
9. Software: A program designed to perform particular tasks.
10. URL: Uniform Resource Locator is also known as a web address.
11. Metadata: Data that describes other data. Data that provides information about one or more aspects of the data.
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