Project Management Series

Post #2 of 6: Timelines

Day-to-Day Tools for Balancing Speed, Quality, and Costs

Project Success = Quality Work Delivered On Time and Within Budget

By combining knowledge from instructional design and project management, we have put together an equipment checklist of key structures needed to hit deadlines while also ensuring quality and maximizing profit in your day-to-day management of a project.

Equipment Checklist:

Timelines can seem like a tedious nuisance over the course of a long project – but they are the core of any successful project team when it comes to meeting deadlines!

A timeline grounds both your internal and external teams. By putting expectations of delivery dates in writing and reinforcing the importance of meeting those deadlines with your team, you hold each team member accountable and can easily show the implications of delayed content or feedback. Whether it is a Gannt Chart or simple Word Document timeline, teams can see the waterfall effect of missed deadlines and how it impacts delivery dates.

Timelines are also a useful tool for any project manager when it comes to spacing delivery dates for the internal team. Teams will not be able to hit deadlines if the workload at any given time is too high, so Gannt Charts are a fantastic option to view how deadlines impact workload. Providing this visual to your team sets them up to successfully deliver the highest quality product on time.

Creating, communicating, and sticking to timelines can help guarantee project success. Without a timeline, projects run the risk of missing key deadlines and delivery dates and/or overloading team members and, therefore, not producing the highest quality work.

Be on the lookout for the next post in this series, which will focus on the importance of establishing a review process for deliverables.