The more time you spend planning with the members of your team in the early stages, the more committed and creative they will be in accomplishing the task once you get started.
7. Set Schedules and Deadlines
Once you have a shared vision and shared plans, and everyone knows exactly what is to be done, and what the ideal result will look like, the next 162
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step is for you to set a deadline for completion based on the consensus of your team. You may require sub-deadlines as well.
Achieving consensus is extremely important in building a peak performing team. Ask people how long they think it will take to complete each part of the task, and to complete the task overall. As the result of discussion and exchange, everyone should agree that the project can and will be completed by a certain time.
One of the biggest mistakes in project management occurs when the project leader sets a date or deadline that is arbitrary and with which the team members do not agree. In each case where this happens, problems arise and the deadline is not met. If the deadline is met, it is usually so full of mistakes and problems that it would have been much better to have agreed on a reasonable deadline before you began.
Set your deadlines based on the consensus of your team, or even a majority decision, if that works for you. Get everyone to agree on the timing and scheduling for each job or task that they will be expected to contribute to the overall project.
8. List Everything That Must Be Done
List every task, function and activity that must be completed, right down to the smallest job. The more that you can break the project down into individual jobs and tasks, the easier it is for you to plan, organize, supervise, delegate, coordinate and get the project finished on time.
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9. Identify the Information You Will Require
Identify any additional information that you will require to complete the project. List the acquisition of the information as a separate task and assign it or delegate it specifically to one of the team members. Set a deadline.
Remember, a decision without a deadline is merely a meaningless discussion. Nothing gets done.
10. Identify the Limiting Factor
Determine the limiting step in the completion of the project. What part of the project, what task or activity, determines the speed at which the project can be completed? What part of the task is the bottleneck that sets the speed for everything else?
For example, when we decide to do a public seminar for 1000 people, the limiting step that determines everything else is finding and booking a hotel or convention facility in a particular city. Finding and finalizing the space for the seminar is almost always the most difficult bottleneck in the whole project. Once we have confirmed a location, we can then begin marketing, sales, advertising, promotion, ticket sales, the shipping of products and materials, staffing, and everything else.
In every project, there is a bottleneck. There is always one task, the achievement of which determines the schedule for everything else. Start off 164
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by identifying your limiting step, and then place the alleviating of that constraint as your top priority.
Put your most talented and capable people, and even yourself, to work on that task. Nothing can be done until that job is done first.
11. Organize the Project
Organize the different parts of the project in two ways: sequential tasks and parallel tasks. You organize by sequence when you determine which jobs must be done before other jobs can be done, with each task in order.
Sequential organization is necessary where a particular task requires that another task be completed before it can be started. In almost every case, before you do anything, you have to do something else first. Organize the task sequentially with a logical process of activities from beginning through to the end of the project.
The second way to organize the task is parallel. Parallel activities exist when more than one task can be done at the same time. Two or more people can be working on two or three different tasks independently of each other.
A Typical Multi-Task Job
For example, let us imagine that you are going to be renting and moving to a new building. The limiting factor or constraint is the decision on the space that you are going to rent, the determination of the exact address and the signing of the necessary rental or lease documents. Once the location has 165
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been determined and secured, several other tasks can be done both sequentially and in parallel.
Some sequential tasks are the determining of the exact requirement for furniture and fixtures in the new offices, the packing up of the old offices, the arranging for a moving company to transfer the furniture, and the actual moving in.
Some parallel activities could be the arranging for new telephones, the ordering of new stationery, the informing of customers, vendors and suppliers of the new address, and other activities that can be done independently of each other.
12. Think on Paper
Create or acquire a simple project management form. Fortunately, because of the recognized importance of project management, there are numerous books, workbooks, planning forms and computer-based project management systems. They can be used for projects as simple as an office birthday party and as complex as the building of a shopping center or football stadium.
The simplest model is something that you can draw by hand and which you can carry in your mind as a template for any project that you become responsible for in the future. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Graph paper or lined paper is ideal. Down the left hand side of the paper, you list every single task that has to be accomplished, up to and including the completion of the project, in the order that the tasks have to be done.
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Across the top of the page, you write the dates of completion for each phase of the project. The times listed across the top may be in days, weeks, months or even years. You may have one column for each week, or one column for each month. If it is a short-term project, you may have a column for each day, with specific tasks to be completed every 24 hours.
Planning a Party
Imagine that you were going to have a Christmas party at your home. The most important first step is to book the caterer for the day that you have planned. Once you have a caterer and a date, you can then proceed through the project to select the menu, confirm the prices, send out the invitations and make arrangements for chairs and tables. Confirming the caterer and the date puts the project into motion.
You make a list down the left-hand column of every step, from determining the date and the caterer all the way through to the final Christmas party.
Across the top you may put in weeks and months. Under those weeks and months you create columns. Now you have a picture of the project with the first step in the project at the upper left hand corner and the final completion of the project in the lower right hand corner.
This project planning form gives you a simple picture that you can review and refer to regularly to be sure that each task is completed on schedule.
This simple project form can be used and reviewed by everyone who is involved in and responsible for any part of organizing the Christmas party.
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The clarity of this project management process dramatically increases the likelihood that everything will be done on time, with no unexpected delays or glitches.
Developing and using a chart like this, or any chart that you find in any time management system, will save you more time, and increase your effectiveness, more than you can imagine. This chart will show you where all of the bottlenecks or problems may arise. It will enable you to anticipate problems in advance, and to take steps to assure that those problems don’t occur.
13. Delegate Responsibilities and Deadlines
Once you have the project planned, the team assembled and every task delineated and laid out in the order in which it must be completed, you then delegate each task with a specific deadline. Build a “fudge factor” into your schedules and aim for the completion of each task comfortably before the deadline. The more important the final date, the more important it is that you build in a cushion of time to assure that the project is completed on time.
Most people aim to finish a project at least 10% of the time before it is due.
If it is a project that takes three weeks, and must be completed by Friday, two weeks from today, set a goal to have the entire project complete by Wednesday, or even Tuesday of that week. Expect that there will be last-minute mistakes, unexpected setbacks and unavoidable delays. This is the mark of the superior executive.