Imagine arriving late for the most crucial presentation of your career. It is not a good idea to start off on the wrong foot, right? Not only in this work scenario, but in all other walks of life, keeping track of your time adequately is extremely crucial.
For teams, supervisors, and every other person, successful project time management is a crucial factor when it comes to the successful delivery of the task. We have all heard “Time is of the essence” and “Time is money” and have often brushed them off as clichés. However, with the help of effective management, we should see results that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.
What is Management of Time
With so much emphasis on the management of time, the million-dollar question is: how is time management important in agile project management? Whenever you take on a project, you need to look at all the factors involved that will lead to its completion. To ascertain the delivery period of the project, a timeline needs to be created. If the created timeline is followed religiously, then you will be able to finish and deliver the project in a timely fashion.
Thus, it is a crucial aspect that ensures that your project team meets deadlines and you have a streamlined process. When it comes to project management time, especially completing deadlines, there are some steps that you need to keep an eye on such as cost management in project management.
Make Use of the Right Equipment
With the help of the right management tools, especially project time tracking tools, you can make or break a project instantly. Those tools can be the right individuals, the right machinery, or the right management software. Whatever it is, you need to monitor it carefully and ensure that you have all the necessary tools and equipment to make your assignment easy and effective. You can use various tools to determine the time spent on various tasks.
You can take help from online sources, go through blog posts of any project management institute that mentions effective time management tools. There are various articles on the management of time that you read it on PapersOwl which are pretty effective and helpful.
Define the Steps
Before you try and set deadlines, you need to define the steps so that you can schedule them accordingly. Determine what your assignment is, and divide the work into steps that will make the process easier and will help you identify your short-term and long-term deliverables. This is an important step in the program evaluation review and one of the crucial steps in the work breakdown structure.
Sequence the Steps
Next, you need to define the order in which you will finish your deliverables. Make a proper time map from the start to finish, prioritize the steps, and make a sequence of them from the start of the project right through to completion.
It is always a good idea to make a to-do list while you are planning the activities to avoid any ambiguities when working towards achieving your goals.
Estimate the Resources
Once you know what you need to do, you will have to plan and determine what things are required to ensure the completion of the assignment at hand. The materials, machinery, people, etc. all that you need to finish the deliverable need to be listed and arranged beforehand. This is a very important evaluation review technique and is one of the most important time management strategies.
Estimate the Duration of the Activity
Once you have made a sequence chart and project plan of the assignment you are going to do, the next step is to estimate the time each activity or step will take. The best way to do this is to look at the total time that you have and then divide the time according to the difficulty of each step.
Allocate the crucial and difficult time for larger periods of time, and shorter periods for the easy steps. Try to keep the deadlines flexible and not too tight. This is simply an estimation, and thus, you have to keep in mind a tolerance period.
This means that if you make a timetable in such a way that even if you have to take an extra day or two, it will not affect your overall schedule in the long run. Keeping a log of your time is essential. Use time tracking tools such as timers, reminders, clocks, etc. that help managing time. They also ensure that you are staying within the set time limits and you are not taking a lot of time to finish a simple assignment.
Review the Schedule
As project managers, it is highly crucial to have excellent time management skills in order to be successful. Without effective management of time, the project and, the company, in the long run, will suffer.
Set the priorities right. See which tasks are crucial and ensure that they are completed first, and then you can go from there. You need to make a formal schedule for your project, and ensure that all the members of your team are well-aware of the deadlines.
Organize your tasks and activities by their official end date. Never try to complete all the work in one sitting. That is not humanly possible and you will be overreaching if you try to accomplish that. Management of time for projects is a team effort and if even one member lags behind others, the results can be disastrous.
Final Word
We don’t even remember the hours of our lives that we have wasted just because we didn’t properly manage our time. Any project or work that we take on, has an official duration and deadline, and if we don’t effectively manage our time, it is very unlikely that we will complete any of our tasks in a timely fashion.
With the help of good team members, an excellent project manager, and an effective project schedule, you are bound to succeed and bring success to your organization.
Here’s to a better, well-organized you!
