Question

Topic of Discussion

“The implementation of realistic time management plans can improve productivity and the quality of life”.

As a project manager, discuss the key steps for creating realistic and successful time management plans.

Answer 1

Below mentioned are some of the key steps which provide an advantage in achieving your goals with the help of a realistic and successful time management plans.

1. The very first step to develop a successful plan is to identify the objective, goal that you wanted to achieve. It is very important for an individual to have a clear understanding of the objective or goal, before proceeding further. You must have answers to the questions like What are we going to deliver? What problems we need to solve?

2. Next comes the Requirement Gathering. This is very important as it helps us to identify what set of resources you have and what set of resources you need to collect or gather in order to reach to the desired goal. It helps us to understand whether the team has a scope of delivering the desired output to the client or not.

3. After gathering all the important and the needful data, we need to create the Work Breakdown Structure. That is, we need to break the larger goals/work into smaller, manageable tasks. This will help us to manage the larger work easily by distributing into the different small-small steps and assigning a specialized skilled workforce according to the work needed to be performed at a particular step.

4. Now list down the set of activities needs to be performed. Arrange these activities in a proper sequential manner to achieve each of these tasks.

5. After identifying and arranging the activities properly, develop the short-term plans and the long-term plans which are required to keep the track of the set of activities need to be performed.

6. Estimate the time required, cost to be incurred, resources to be used to complete the desired set of activities.

7. Develop the near-term plans, quality check plans, risk management plans, requirement management plans, resource management plans, performance measuring plans, to keep track of the ongoing activities.

8. Maintain a well-defined record of everything in a document. Documentation is a healthy habit required for creating a successful time management plans as it helps us in an effective management of all the activities needs to be performed, activities already performed, task completed, and those tasks remaining to accomplish.