Handle unplanned work

Communication is critical to the success of any project, and issues are an important communication tool. As a project manager, you want your team to communicate well with you. If there are problems, concerns, or confusion about the project, you want to know about it. You should, of course, encourage the team to communicate, but it really helps to have a process in place that facilitates communication. People might ask, how do I get the project manager’s attention? You can do that with either updates or issues, but which is best? Updates are good for questions or discussions, but they are hard to organize, assign, and track. Issues are great for things that need to be assigned and tracked. They are great for things that need to be resolved before the project can be completed. You can’t change the status of a project to complete if there are any open issues, and issues are easier to monitor. A project manager can monitor the issues tab in a project, like here. Or they can monitor a custom report that shows open issues across many projects, like this. How to log an issue Go to the issues tab of the task that the issue applies to. If it doesn’t apply to a particular task, enter it at the project level. Either way, the issue will show up on the project issue list. Click add more issues. The name is the only required field. But you can also change the priority. Email notifications can automatically be sent to notify a person when they are assigned to an issue. They can also be sent to notify the project manager when a new issue is added to the project they own. Your system administrator can set this up for you. If you want to access all issue fields when adding a new issue, or if you want a convenient way to attach a document, click on new issue. Best practices for issue management As a project manager, monitor your issues frequently. Issues may be critical and need quick attention. If you have several active projects at the same time, create a custom report for efficiency. Answer questions in the issue So interested team members can find the answer rather than having to ask you about it. If you decide not to deal with an issue, you can give a status of won’t resolve. But be sure to include a comment with an explanation so multiple people won’t have to ask you why. This also becomes a part of the historical record and can help you in planning future projects. Show gratitude in your responses so people will continue to be willing to communicate with you by logging issues. When needed, you can convert the issue to a task and plan it into the project timeline.