Enhance Productivity with an Effective Project Management Timeline

It doesn’t matter if a person is cleaning their house, working on a school project, or developing a high-end game. Management of every activity or step in the working process is essential.

Project management can be done on paper or online. Whatever you choose, having a visual map of the activities ensures that you don’t miss out on anything. Moreover, visual representation of the process also helps in enhancing efficiency.

Now, there could be several criticalities in creating a project management timeline. And it’s normal to feel overwhelmed or worried by the process that needs to be followed. Allow us to help you get on track by listing some simple steps to create a project timeline.

A Brief-up of Project Timeline!

A project management timeline is a visual chart that contains all the necessary aspects required to complete a project on time. These aspects include tasks, their priority, assigned personnel, deadline, assignee, milestones, etc.

The representation of these aspects in a visual form enables faster project delivery and greater efficiency.

Also Read : 4 Effective Ways to Boost Productivity At Workplace

Benefits of Project Management Timeline

The formulation of a project management timeline has countless benefits, such as

– No delay in project delivery: As everyone gets to know their job responsibilities and deadline beforehand, there are no chances of delay.

– Easy to track progress: When all the tasks are listed on a project timeline, it becomes simple for team leaders and managers to keep track of them.

– Helps in prioritizing: A well-represented timeline can help in prioritizing tasks easily whenever required.

– Enhances productivity: Getting tasks done on time elevates the team’s confidence and motivates them to stay productive.

How to Create a Project Management Timeline?

As per stats, around 11.4% of an organization’s resources are wasted due to bad project management processes. Therefore, it is crucial to have a well-planned project timeline for monitoring project status.

Here is how you can create one!

1. Generate a brief of the project!

Your project could be massive with a lot of variables. Therefore, it can be tough to create a timeline with all of them in it. Moreover, a comprehensive project is also tough to explain in the raw state. Hence, you need to create a brief summary of the key points of your project. These key points may include:

– Description of the project and other background information, if any.

– The objectives of the project

– Milestones and plan of management

– Essential project descriptions

– Ballpark costs

– Target audience and expected outcome

Once you have all of this information in a short, crisp, and concise form, it will be easier for you to pitch it in front of clients, investors, and managers.

2. Analyze the Project Scope

Project scope is a critical part of project management as it deals with the documentation of every specific aspect of the project. The essential part of project scope management is to list down all the tasks or steps to complete the project.

For example, if you have to develop a game, the steps to that will be

– Planning

– Pre-production (storyline, prototype)

– Production (modeling, rendering, etc.)

– Testing

– Pre-launch (beta version, marketing hype, etc.)

– Launch 

– Post-production

You need to further break down these steps into smaller tasks. It will help in easier task assignments.

3. Allot a fixed time per task

As per a survey by Monday, around 54% of the employees spend five or more hours on tedious tasks per week. As this can lead to low productivity, you need to allot a certain time limit for a particular task. If it takes more than that time, it needs to be reassigned or automated.

When you have a fixed time for each task, it will trigger urgency and can lead to faster results. It will also keep the person productive and punctual.

4. Define dependencies

It is pretty obvious that your project will need the collaboration of different people on multiple tasks. More importantly, the completion of one task will depend on the completion of microtasks assigned to multiple people.

To avoid any delay in task completion and project delivery, you need to align all the dependencies beforehand. It will help in saving time and avoiding backlogs. You also need to inform people if their task is required for the completion of someone else’s task.

5. Establish milestones

Tracking the progress of your project is a critical thing to do. Therefore, it is essential to establish milestones such as fixing a date for a task, an event, or some specific deliverables. These milestones need to be considered as achievements to motivate your team.

6. Build the timeline

Building a timeline requires a project management app or software. Building a project management timeline begins with setting the time frame of project completion. Post that, you need to add tasks with their priorities, time frames, and dependencies. Lastly, you need to establish milestones to keep track of the work.

You can use various project management apps like Monday, Asana, Trello, etc.

Conclusion

If you are up for a new project, you definitely need to invest in a project management tools and develop a timeline. It will help you manage tasks better, reduce development time, and enhance productivity. If you want to make the process of building a project timeline easier, go for an awesome project management tool, TaskOPad.