Organizing Project Management Step 4: Scheduling
Organizing project management includes managing the schedules of everyone involved. This can include organizers, contractors, movers, and even the client!
Before you begin to schedule for this project make an outline of what you will need to do and who will need to be involved.
Next, you will need to line up the parts of the project that depend on others schedules. Check availability and make arrangements for the most important pieces of your project first. For example, get the move date scheduled with your moving company before you schedule the organizers to help unpack.
One of the most important parts of planning and managing projects is the timing and the order in which you schedule services. If you have ever had contracting work done in your own home, you realize there are certain things that have to happen before other things can be done.
Step One: Create a timeline. Include a project start date, end date and any fixed dates, such as a home closing date.
Step Two: Organize your activities list and put them in order of what needs to happen first. Some activities can happen simultaneously and you can make a note of that. But, get them in order.
Step Three: Assign a time frame to each activity. Will it take one day, six days, or an hour?
Step Four: Assign a person or persons to each activity. For example: Will the organizers or movers being doing the packing? Who will be removing the trash or taking donations away?
Use a Gantt Chart or spreadsheet to put everything together. A Gantt chart is a useful ways of showing activities (tasks or events) displayed against time. On the left of the chart is a list of the activities and along the top is a suitable time scale. Each activity is represented by a bar; the position and length of the bar reflects the start date, duration and end date of the activity. This allows you to see at a glance:
- What the various activities are
- When each activity begins and ends
- How long each activity is scheduled to last
- Where activities overlap with other activities, and by how much
- The start and end date of the whole project
To summarize, a Gantt chart shows you what has to be done (the activities) and when (the schedule). You can learn more about Gantt Charts online.
Once you have your schedule in place make sure you share it with everyone involved. You will also need to visit it daily and possible make changes as the project moves along.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for organizing project management next steps….
