Question

Sydney was a newly hired project manager at a consulting firm. She has previous experience working on project teams but had never led a project on her own. She has only been with the firm for two weeks and has spent a week of that time in onboarding. Her manager, the head of operations, has just assigned her to a rather large project. The project is to evaluate the current processes in use within the organization specifically focused in two areas: new service development and client engagement. Sydney was told to select who she needed to work on the project and reach out to the managers of both groups to get the project started. The Problem: While excited about the opportunity, Sydney realized she had a few challenges ahead: • She has had no time to establish relationships within the organization • She realized that it may be difficult to engage the departments in the initiative given the project she was asked to lead • She was concerned about selecting team members when she did not yet know much about the others in the organization (their skills and knowledge and expertise) • She knew very little about the organization outside of what she learned in the onboarding program and her research when she was applying for the project manager role Sydney needed to start the project fairly soon. She didn’t have the luxury of taking time to build relationships and get to know people before the project had to begin.

Question: How could timelines be determined?

Answer 1

In this question, you need to understand what a timeline in a project is. Basically it is the period in which a project is meant to begin and end.

One thing to factor in while determining timelines is ensuring you understand the nature of your project. This will help you have an idea of how short or lengthy that project can be depending on how detailed it is. Also, you might want to understand the efficiency of the resources that you are working with. this could be man power, machines or any other useful resource, this could help you evaluate the speed of your project especially after interacting with them.

When determining timelines, it is also important to breakdown your project in smaller bits or sections, this could help you understand, which of these sections needs more details, and which requires just a small effort. With this knowledge, you can avoid the mistake of spending too much in one section and leaving the most important ones unattended. Also, it will give you an idea of what sections depend on each other, which is an important thing when striving to achieve a certain task.

With most of these factors noted, you can now be able to estimate on how long your project is likely to take. This is much better than just running into a project without having a clear picture of how long each section is likely to take. Also, this strategies motivate you to keep on working on the project and avoid lagging behind.

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