City Talent tools allows you to manage projects with ease. The beauty of City Talent lies in the fact that all our tools are interwoven and well synchronized, increasing their effectiveness to a great extent. Once you create a project, two most important task needs to be done are:

1.	Adding team members to your project
2.	Creating tasks in your project

However, in smaller projects involving one or two team members, you may choose not create task. But for projects which are in larger size and require multiple team members with varied roles creating tasks will be a necessity. City Talent always recommends assigning task to team members irrespective of project/team size.

1. Working with Tasks

As you work with multiple team members when requirements are demanding and time frame is limited, tasks will be more and more significant to you. Here is a quick guide to managing your tasks.

Defining tasks

Tasks are the key to your project success. Tasks are the manifestations of your project plan. Before you kick start your project work, try to segregate tasks based on the order they will be undertaken. For example, in a software development project, the first task will be to create requirements specifications. Another parallel task could be prototyping. The task that will follow immediately after these two tasks are database design, architecture development and then the next task could be programming. In this way once you decide on your task priorities, the next job is to break each of these areas into different segments in order to assign to a team member. Each of the tasks mentioned above can be undertaken by one or more team members. The key points to be kept in mind while creating tasks are as below:

1.	Be realistic about task assignments, a task should not be too narrow or nor too broad.
2.	Define tasks for shorter period. When you break your project tasks into smaller pieces, it becomes extremely easy to track the progress; since you can assign tasks for a shorter period. However, this highly varies from project to project.
3.	Create tasks beforehand, even when project members are not yet assigned. This helps a lot because as soon as you start adding members, you can begin assigning tasks. Tasks act like a project plan and if they are created beforehand, you have a lot more control.

Managing tasks

For each task, you can view the total hours a team member has spent on it by going into the task detail page.
If a particular task has crossed its due date, it will be converted it to light red color, signifying the delay. You should work with the team member to understand the bottlenecks/slowdown in the task and take appropriate actions. You may choose to assign another team member to the task and/or extend the task deadline.

When no further work needs to be undertaken for a certain task, you can close the task. The task will no longer be available for the provider for reporting (In City Time). You can choose to re-open a closed task or simply remove the task if it is no longer needed.

Learn more about City Time

2. Tracking work

Now that you have organized your project well and all functions are assigned to each team member, your job of tracking progress is easy.

You can view entire activity across all projects for each team member in your My Team area. In the activity summary you can view tasks done by your team member each day and number of hours worked on each task/project. As a result, you can easily benchmark your progress by comparing deliverables and the hours consumed by your team.

Since you will be billed on the number of hours your team spends in various tasks/projects, the activity summary can become an invaluable tool in determining exactly what you are going to pay for.

Analyzing work logs

There will be situations where you will feel the number of work hours do not justify the output/deliverables of a team member. In such situation, City Talent can help you determine the real picture. You can view the work logs page which provides a detailed report of every hour spent by provider on your projects.
City Talent captures following data through its automated work reporting tool ‘City Time’ every 10 minutes:

	Screen snap
	Keyboard / mouse activity level
	Application in use
	Tasks
	Project

Through this information you can easily determine the actually work conditions of the provider and authenticity of the work done.

Learn more about City Time
Learn more about using Work Log page