Enhanced Web-Based Issue Tracking Along With Task Management

Making your business operate smoothly is a lot easier with the right project management and administration tools. These procedures revolve around both planning and rapid response times to issues when they appear. Tools that help planning (everything from budget analysis tools to project management software) get the majority of the press when it comes to effective project management. Ironically, it's the opposite end of the development phase - web based task management and issue tracking - where modern software architecture can certainly create the greatest rewards.

Network based issue management systems have been around ever since the days of Novell Netware, and have made slow, small enhancements since that time. One of the latest rounds of improvements is actually the confluence of virtual private networking and IP networks, coupled with the ubiquity with the internet browser. These web based issue tracking systems allow your support workers to offload much of the data entry side of your defect management loop to the end users.

The usual defect tracking cycle runs in a predictable loop - the end user calls up the engineering team, they talk about what's going wrong, and if the solution isn't instantly apparent, it may get escalated to second level assistance. What internet based incident tracking systems allow is for the customer first to go through a number of questions and answer loops addressing the basics, while also inputting things like version numbers of software and the like. When the internet based support doesn't solve the problem, the relevant data has already been entered, helping to save time for that second level support technician.

More advanced types of web based issue tracking systems put a customer on all of the relevant hardware; this client reports back with full system data to a central repository run by your organization.

Once the issue has been logged, including all pertinent information (either by clients entering data, or perhaps a software client reporting back to your centralized system), the other advantage of web based event tracking becomes apparent: Issues may come right into a central repository, and be allotted to the appropriate technicians by their availability, their level of expertise, or how full their present workload is. As each issue gets escalated or annotated, it's added to the issue log, which is then open to the entire technical services department.

A redacted version of the log may also be made available to your support customers, either by email, or by web login, to enable them to see that progress has been made. Among the great slowdowns on IT technical support would be that the technicians get asked by customers about the status of pending jobs - and spend too much time answering those questions that the job queue can get unmanageable. By automating this report feature, you are able to free up both time for your technicians to resolve the problem, and increase transparency with the response loop.

Because these solutions are web based, they also become location independent. This really is critical when you are attempting to coordinate the efforts of several staffers throughout several campuses. Centralizing the reporting solution is of great assistance.

While these software programs are solid now, there is nevertheless place for improvement; the majority of that creativity is being directed at making the program easier to use for the customers rather than the technicians, so the customers will have an easier time resolving their particular technical issues.

AdminiTrack has become a leader in the industry of web based task and issue tracking. They offer an easy-to-use and very powerful "Software as a Service" (SaaS) issue tracking application that has been specifically designed for professional project teams. For a free 30 day trial visit http://www.AdminiTrack.com

While conducting research for this article, I learned about hosted issue tracking and web based issue tracking software at www.Adminitrack.com.