Mastering Your Time

Mastering Your Time

Overview

"Plan the work, work the plan." This simple phrase can be your guide through many difficult times in a project management career. The Time Management Knowledge Area should be applied with the support of a project scheduling tool. Of course, it can be done with 3×5 cards to gather information and then organized in a spreadsheet. However, the spreadsheet will only communicate the proposed plan. Once the project starts and the dynamics of a project ensue—dates slip, unplanned scope is added, resources are suddenly unavailable—managing from the spreadsheet will probably become quite frustrating. The plan will no longer be a tool to provide project tracking and oversight. At that point, you will have lost control of your project.

Activity Definition

For any project manager just coming on board a project, the critical first steps are to learn about the people involved—both stakeholders and the project team—and to understand the issues that currently exist and exactly what the project is expected to deliver. These steps are forerunners to Activity Definition.

For the steps described in the PMI standard under the heading Activity Definition, you must have a clear understanding of the activities that are outlined in the WBS. This will become important as you identify the inter-dependencies among activities, as well as the type of resources that should be assigned to each of the activities. Start from the beginning, not the end, and resist the temptation to focus too heavily on dates. Although later it will be necessary to come back and look at how the "realistic" plan fits into the needs of the business, at this stage it is important to find out what your people believe are the necessary tasks required for project completion. This can also help to provide the ammunition that you need to fight for a date based on the effort involved.

Activity Sequencing

After developing an understanding of what needs to be done to make your project a success, the next step understands the dependencies between the activities. A network diagram (which can be created in a scheduling tool such as MS Project) visually displays how the work in a project comes together. Your project's network diagram will help to flush out the relationships between tasks within a team and dependencies of work between teams. As you focus on the workflow, look for areas where work can be done in parallel. If you don't have a project scheduling tool or are uncomfortable using it at this point, the 3×5 cards and/or Post-It notes that you used in Activity Definition can be placed on a wall or white board to facilitate team discussion.

Focus first on those tasks within a particular team of the project; i.e., developers, testers, etc. Questions such as "what happens after task X?" and "what do you need to get started with Task Y?" move the discussion along. Push for a healthy discussion on what is needed for each of the activities to get started. Are Activities X and Y needed for Z to start? ...