With the current release 1.4 we have laid the foundation for a project and task management in foreknown. But why does foreknown need this functionality?

There are two main reasons, which we would like to explain in this article.

Goals of foreknown

The further development of foreknown is currently characterized by two main goals.

Real-time Jira integration.

We are in the middle of developing Jira Integration to synchronize projects, tasks and working hours with foreknown in real time. We have now implemented the necessary structures in foreknown for this purpose.

The data we receive in this way provides us with so many opportunities to create added value for our users. Whether it's billing for recorded working hours, evaluating planned/actual values, or providing forecasts to validate set milestones.

This brings us to the second goal.

Comprehensive Evaluation Options.

With foreknown we create a tool that prepares important key figures and forecasts for all parties involved, whether managers, project managers, team managers or team members, so that problems can be identified earlier and the right measures can be taken.

With the last two major releases, we have already provided the first controlling functions, such as the KPIs on Service Entry Level and the KPIs on Order Level. And with future releases, we will create many more evaluation options. We will distinguish between role-based dashboards and controlling functions on the individual business objects, such as orders, services, projects, tasks, customers.

Where the journey goes...

Currently, the new area "Project Management" in foreknown does not yet exhaust all possibilities. But this will change quickly over the next few releases. Because we have a clear vision of how these areas will be expanded in foreknown.

Projects

The projects in foreknown are used for the implementation of won orders. Therefore, in the future we will project orders or even individual order items. That means, we will assign them to a project for implementation. All working hours is not only be recorded in the context of a task, but is automatically assigned directly to the corresponding order items as activities. In this way, we ensure that the focus always remains on the customer's underlying order, even during project implementation.

Furthermore, projects will be extended by a controlling function, as it already exists today for orders, in order to ideally support the entire development process, especially also for agile projects (Scrum, Kanban), in planning and implementation.

Foreknown will provide key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluations like

  • showing the planning status of the product backlog.
  • showing a possible distribution of the estimated tasks over the next Sprints.
  • checking the feasibility of milestones and showing bottlenecks
  • providing the completion status of epics, releases and milestones

With these insights, the entire team maintains focus on the important issues to be able to implement projects more successfully.

Tasks

The tasks represent the smallest unit for determining plan/actual deviations and also provide important information as to why, for example, sprint targets were not achieved or team velocity is changing.

Therefore, we will also create a controlling functionality with important key figures on the task level.

For the retrospective, it is important to identify the tasks that show the strongest deviations from the original plan. Why was the estimate overestimated and how can it be improved for the future? These questions can be better assessed by comparing planned and actual efforts, by an activity index and other indicators.

Furthermore, parallels between tasks that have already been implemented and those that still need to be estimated can be used to take into account empirical values from the past.

Conclusion

Foreknown already provides important key figures today, so that entrepreneurs, project managers or team managers can recognize and assess current developments earlier.

With the controlling functions of the project and task management, many more key figures and evaluation options will be created in the future. All with the aim of giving everyone involved in projects more security in the implementation of their tasks.

Only those who recognize the actual reasons for past failures can learn from them for the future.