Here are five frequently asked questions that every PM needs to read:

What is an Issue and Why Must You Track it?

In software development, an Issue or Bug is a glitch in your software system that causes the program to behave in a way other than designed. Issues can range from the show stopper, a fatal error that causes irreparable damage to your software system, to the very minor glitch. Obviously, each issue in the system is not going to have the same importance, or urgency, attached to it. Critical issues, the show stoppers mentioned above, need to be solved first before you can do anything else. Lower urgency issues are the minor ones, which you or your team can put off until time permits. There are tons of other details, that are relevant to the fate of your software, to keep track of like who experienced the issue (was it a customer or someone within the company), when was the bug found, what exactly was it that the user experienced (in order to be solved, this needs to be extremely detailed!), what solutions were attempted, and much more.

An issue tracking system or tool will manage and maintain your lists of issues. Organizations commonly use Issue tracking systems in their customer support call centers to create, assign, update, track and resolve reported issues. These issues could come from customers directly, or even from the organization's other (non IT) employees. An issue tracking system will often also contain a knowledge base, which stores information on each customer, fixes for common problems, and other important and useful data.

Principle Three: Prioritize

You’d be surprised at how much time you, and your development team, are wasting by not assigning priority and severity to every task.  Issues come in, bugs are discovered, and new application features are conceived of every day. Every item won’t be crucial to fulfilling your business goal, but your team has no way of concretely which tasks are most important to the company unless someone in management tells them.  Priority tells your team how important it is that they resolve this issue immediately.  Assigning priority and enforcing it, whenever any task or issue is assigned, will make your team work more efficiently.  

Setting priority is akin to designating a time slot for every task that you assign a team member during the day.  Urgent issues and tasks are certain to be tackled first thing in the morning, with low priority items waiting until later on when all others have been completed. With a clear idea of which tasks, issues or tests are most important, your team members can easily plan their days to make the best use of their time.  Think about your own work habits.  Without prioritizing, it’s easy to get caught up in busy work, fielding every new issue that comes in.  But just because an issue was the last one to cross your desk doesn’t make it the most important. Now think about how you structure your own to-do list? If you think that something is critical, but potentially time consuming,are you more or less likely to put it first on your list? However, if you KNOW that this thing is of highest importance to your boss, does it move up on your to-do list?