Project management - Project list

The project/task list is one of the most useful tools a decent project manager is going to need. 
Imagine you are a project manager for external/internal projects and you have more than 20 projects to manage. If you do not have a decent list of projects you soon will be lost and confused. You are going to forget most of the communication done for every single project and put the projects in risk of failure.

So you definitely need a place to store all of your projects information, due dates, progress, task-numbers, etc. And this is why you need this magic tool… the project list.

What information should you put into the project list?

Well, before you get too excited keep in mind that on top of everything else - the project list should be useful and very easy to browse. Imagine a customer is calling you to discuss something about his project. You really need to be able to quickly get to the proper location and information for this particular project. And you definitely do not want to overdo your project list and make it hard to browse.

To start – you need the project’s name for sure. If it is a web project you also need the web site this project is associated with. It is important to have a place to write notes too. And if you are using tasks management software like Jira you need a place to keep record of all Jira task numbers referring to this project. It is also good to have a row with the current phase of the project, and also the date of the latest action – when something was done for the project.

Example of a good project list

Here is an example of the project list I use (click on the picture to enlarge it).

And these are the fields I use:
- Project name – make it clear enough.
- Web site – web site associated with the project. This could really be software name or something else, depending on the type of the project.
- Phase – the current stage of the project.
- Date of last action – should give you a hint when was the last time something happened on that particular project.
- Due date – put your final due date for the completion of the project there.
- Notes/Comments - the most important field!!! Always put a short memo when something happens to the project. Use the format – date/hour and what happened. This way you could always keep track over the project’s actions and parties involved. You could also very easily create reports using the “notes” field.
- Jira N – contains the task number in Jira. It could be used with other task management software as well.