1. Create a project timeline
Using project management skills, you’ll divide your project into phases and build individual tasks within those phases. Next, you’ll manage those phases, rather than the project as a whole. You’ll also estimate the length of each phase by identifying the major tasks you’ll need to accomplish within each phase with milestones. Once you put this all together, you’ll map the tasks, phases, and milestones to build a project timeline.
2. Pinpoint significant resources and budget
Resource allocation is an integral part of this process because each task will be assigned the resources needed and those resources are managed within the task. Once you’ve completed your timeline, you’ll need to identify the resources needed to complete each task.
Each project will have its own set of necessary resources and will vary from project to project. The types of resources are:
People: Any teammates who contribute work to the project.
Equipment: Any types of tools or software you’ll need to produce resources from ideation to project delivery. Make sure to also take into account that specialty equipment requires a significant investment of time and money.
Materials: Consumable items you’ll need—this includes items from office supplies to gas for your automobiles.
Facilities: Buildings and workspaces where your team will work.
Budget: The money you’ll need to purchase any of the resources above.
As you manage your project and its subsequent budget, you’ll track expenses within your project accounting to stay current and ensure you don’t spend more money than allotted per task.
3. Nominate available resources
Now you need to find and request the resources to meet your deadlines. This includes everything from gathering equipment and supplies, but also to finding team members who are available to work. While those resources are allowed to work on multiple projects at once, you need to be cognizant of their capacity.
4. Assign and allocate resources
After finding your resources, you’ll need to add them to the project. Be sure to plan for any challenges that may delay project completion—these challenges can range from software issues to stakeholder changes to organizational priority shifts. Here are some common challenges your team might face in trying to deliver an on-time project:
While some of these challenges have a bigger impact than others, all of these can slow down the delivery of a project. But luckily for many of these, you’ll have the luxury of identifying and planning contingency plans and corresponding techniques to apply ahead of time if any of these occur during your project.
5. Track project schedule
It may seem simple, but any change can affect your entire project timeline from that point forward so make sure to pad your time accordingly. Watch out for:
Overworked and overutilized team members.
Unplanned vacations or sick time off.
Delayed tasks that’ll cause significant delays to dependent tasks.
Changes to business goals and objectives.
Some tools like professional services automation (PSA) software offer opportunities to help automate time-consuming, administrative tasks like time tracking, project management, billing, and more.
6. Choose a technique for tackling roadblocks
You’ll rarely ever hit every task when originally planned and finish a project on the exact dates. Depending on your project’s delivery date, you may have some flexibility when you can finish certain tasks. There are two techniques you can use if you find yourself running behind schedule: resource smoothing and resource leveling.
Resource leveling works well when you have limited or shared resources, but you have the option to extend your timeline. Resource smoothing is best for optimizing the resources you have available, but you have a deadline can’t be extended.
Choosing which technique works best will depend on how malleable your timeline will be. Whichever technique you choose, you need to be sure your management tool is as flexible as you are.
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